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There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

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Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#31

Post by fanzhang »

ip26 wrote: post #22

This is depressing. Single use disposable. Full of copper, gold, tungsten, halfnium. Will leach poison into the ground. Some of the most advanced technology of our age. Use it once, toss it in the trash. Meanwhile the paper versions work just fine.

Another view is that it's a great illustration of the relative price trends in the last 50 years. Healthcare has gone way up in price, and tech way down. What was a supercomputer 50 years ago is now a small fraction of the cost of a chemical test (which requires FDA approval).

Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#32

Post by wcunning »

wcunning wrote: post #26

So my followup question is: I have a few of these, can I do anything with them once I'm done with the test? Hook up to the headers and reprogram? What about the Binax test? Or any of the other "connected" ones?

Answering my own question: he gets there much later in the thread -- looks like single wired debug is available at a pad on the board.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1475268224635662336

Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#33

Post by BoorishBears »

bsder wrote: post #29
Uptrenda wrote: post #4

I worked at a company that was using these chips to control doors. They're extremely cheap chips, but writing code for them is not pleasant. Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Props to the devs who helped put this together.

> Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Okay, I'm going to ask "Compared to whom?" Nordic has been one of the better BLE chip manufacturers in terms of documentation, in my experience. Most places use Keil tools directly from ARM. So, if programming these sucks, so does programming most embedded Cortex M4 chips. (No argument. Keil sucks. However, that doesn't mean that Nordic su…

Say what you will about the hardware, but ESP-IDF is the gold standard for me now

Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#35

Post by jkelleyrtp »

Uptrenda wrote: post #4

I worked at a company that was using these chips to control doors. They're extremely cheap chips, but writing code for them is not pleasant. Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Props to the devs who helped put this together.

In contrast, embedded Rust is quite a pleasant experience on the nrf line, including the 52xx series.

Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#37

Post by joezydeco »

Having worked on automated ELISA equipment decades ago, it's kind of interesting to see this come full circle.

The earliest machines used a light source and color filter to try and get the signal from the finished enzyme sandwich. Then lateral-flow came along and it was up to a human to make the observation. Now we're back to the computer doing it again.

Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#38

Post by stbtrax »

wcunning wrote: post #26

So my followup question is: I have a few of these, can I do anything with them once I'm done with the test? Hook up to the headers and reprogram? What about the Binax test? Or any of the other "connected" ones?

probably not worth your time unless you're looking for an art project. you can get a devkit for dollars that has pins brought out and more flash and ram https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001593980172.html

Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

#40

Post by azinman2 »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #28
ip26 wrote: post #22

This is depressing. Single use disposable. Full of copper, gold, tungsten, halfnium. Will leach poison into the ground. Some of the most advanced technology of our age. Use it once, toss it in the trash. Meanwhile the paper versions work just fine.

If you read the full Twitter thread they explain that paper doesn’t work for everyone (the color blind and the incompetent, for example.) There is a use case, it just might not be for you.

The Abbott test has two lines separated… if two then positive, if one then negative. You don’t even need to tell the colors apart.
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