I would have understood an IoT widget for the purpose of contact tracing but for this instead? ...
There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
41–50 of 199 posts
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#42Nordic is not really that cheap if you just want a Cortex-M4. You buy Nordic parts for their radios. If you just want processing power, GigaDevices has an M4 at less than $1 last I checked. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work for the design we were working on as the standby power consumption wasn't great.
If you want bargain basement processors with connectivity, Qualcomm is still selling many of the old CSR chips. The low end chips went for <$0.50 in volume and the power consumption was often barely worth measuring. We used to chuck them into products every time every time I lost an argument with the hardware team about whether 10-15 cents of BOM cost is worth 3 months of painful bringup.
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#43This 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.
The optics on this seem to indicate that it is just a lateral flow test of some kind. It's not even different. Instead of having to interpret a couple lines you have software interpret the strip and tell you over bt on your phone. So much tech for so little.
For an app that displays positive or negative, wouldn't it be cheaper/easier to use image processing to detect lines on the test?
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#44This 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.
That is something your phone can do for you without the need for a disposable chip
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#45FYI some of those Ellume brand tests were recalled: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e...
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#46I 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.
At that point, why not just use something like the original SoC from the Raspberry Pi 1 and use the plethora of Linux dev tools available?
Nordic nRF5x chips has community Arduino support(which is very nice to me!) if that's what you want.
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#47This 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.
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Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#48This 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.
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What powerful political and economic interests want these boondoggles to stay in place?
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#49So 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?
Basically all those nRF5x products are Arduino compatible AirTags with a battery included. IIRC they also have an imprecise but low power, chip integral temperature gauge. Maybe a wireless interval thermometer might be a good start?
Re: There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit
#50I 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.
I write baremetal fw for those chips. No debugger, extremely bad stdlib which I rewrote, no qemu. Horrible modem interface. But still much more pleasent than Linux FW or raspi's.
They are cheap, last 10 years with a single battery, and do only what they need to do. Also secure. No crazy attack vectors. And easily symbolically verifiable. And I wrote tons of simulators and fuzzers for them.