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Everything with a battery should have an off switch

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Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#401

Post by mmoskal »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #256
michaelt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah I wish we could get those prices. You might enjoy [1] about a microcontroller that's ~3 cents, in quantity 10. Of course it's only one-time-programmable, and generally pretty basic. And that's a pre-supply-chain-crisis price - these days prices have risen to 9 cents [2]. Still very cheap though! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhAGnsnO7w [2] https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC...

Have you developed anything with that microcontroller, or tried to use that datasheet? An ATTiny10 or PIC16F is so much better documented, so much better supported, so much more featureful, and so much better in every way that the average small-volume product design house will never make up the 40-cent price difference per part. How many development hours or support hours can you bill before you're penny-wise and pou…

Because the chips are so simple, I actually found the datasheets for Padauks to be sufficient. In particular, I don't think it's any more confusing than say STM32 or even NRF52 datasheets, mostly because the chips are so much easier and thus the datasheets are sooooo much shorter. Granted, I have not worked with 8-bit MCUs other than Padauks.

Their compiler/macro-assembler also seems to be working just fine, once you get past the UI from early 2000s. The error messages that must have been auto-translated from Traditional Chinese, but you squint a little bit and get the idea.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#402

Post by Arrath »

lobochrome wrote: post #71
Nanite wrote: post #4

Examples lying around in my house: Bathroom scale: lovely it powers up when you tap it, but eats up 2 button cells a year for a few dozen uses a year Kitchen scales, bit more use, at least once a day but again 2 button cells a year electronic caliper: Same, eats up 1 button cell a year, just sitting in my toolbox Strangely enough none of our kids toys with batteries seem to suffer from this problem How much extra cos…

Regarding Kitchen Scale: I recently bought this [1]. It works with friction - you turn the nob once or twice and you're good to go for a couple weigh ins. It feels rather cheap - so let's see if it really lasts. I love the idea though. I wish we had more energy harvesting gadgets like this. [1]; https://caso-design.de/en/p/caso-kitchen-energy-design-kitch...

When I was a child my parents had a purely mechanical scale, with a dial to adjust the zero.

Yet another case of why fix what isn't broken. Only, I expect that an IC or two and an lcd to run a digital scale are cheaper at volume than some amount of mechanical clockwork, once the cost of batteries is pushed off on to the consumer.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#403

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

bombcar wrote: post #205
vsareto wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you're pissed, but there's plenty of technology that you seemingly forget about (being pissed off makes you a bit irrational) that works most of the time. Saying nothing ever fucking works is just a dumb take

It’s nice sometimes to have a deep dive into technology that does work, and works so well you barely even notice it. When it’s failing is when it comes to the forefront. Crappy touchscreens seem to be a major component in lots of them, had an experience with an elevator “system” with a touchscreen that was mildly annoying.

It's interesting that you and the sibling comment both mention elevators :)

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#404

Post by marcosdumay »

rocqua wrote: post #238
swader999 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think bigger. Do the whole house. There's paint you can get for this.

Does that actually work for 5G? I believe that, in urban areas, you can even get cell reception from inside a microwave because a phone needs very little signal.

> because a phone needs very little signal

Isn't it because the microwave is shielded against a very specific frequency, that is much lower than the 5G one? So that the 5G frequency penetrates the shielding without much trouble?

(I'm really not sure, that's my initial guess, but the questions are not rhetorical.)

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#405

Post by Ensorceled »

lizardactivist wrote: post #391

I'm thinking a lot about security aspects of this. If I turn off my iPhone, MacBook, or Google Pixel phone, are they really off? What are the security implications of "modern standby" on laptops where the CPU and WiFi are always on even after I fold the lid down?

And Bluetooth ...

Pretty annoying that my closed laptop, that's in another room, can drift in and out of being "found" by my bluetooth headset and stop music playing.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#406

Post by JasonFruit »

hnbad wrote: post #387
JasonFruit wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we care whether Foone's mad at HN? Posting to a medium you don't own and expecting to be able to control who responds and how never really works out. If you want control over who sees your content and how they can respond, you have to use a medium you control, and I don't see why Foone is special in that regard.

The reason I said what foone wants and doesn't want is precisely that they can not control what others do. Yes, you can disregard all that, follow them on twitter and angrily chastise them for not sticking to cool tech projects and tell them to use a proper blogging platform, but I was providing this information based on the expectation that most people reading it would not want to be intentionally rude. If the only…

My point is that when Foone posts are shared here, someone always follows up with The Official Rules for Interacting With Foone. Others neither expect nor get such treatment. What's different about Foone?

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#408

Post by cute_boi »

swader999 wrote: post #384
rocqua wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually work for 5G? I believe that, in urban areas, you can even get cell reception from inside a microwave because a phone needs very little signal.

I can still get cell reception in my bedroom that has three coats of the paint with proper copper grounding running through it all. But it barely registers on my meter now whereas before it was 100x. I'm sensitive to emf and do sleep noticeably better now. I still turn my phone and wifi off at night. I'm about 400 metres from a cell tower. Rural so no 5g yet I think. Yeah I have the window film and metal window scree…

Can you explicate more about emf sensitivity! Just asking because I have never heard such thing. And, yea caging entire house is probably arduous and costs fortune.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#409

Post by Finnucane »

dpatru wrote: post #251
kemayo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY fail, designed for people who are assumed not to know what they're doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-literate person around them that could assist them if they could in fact identify the problem. It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it. They did hide away the error messages, but th…

> It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it. They did hide away the error messages, but they didn't provide help and insight. > If they had done so, you'd have (presumably) been told in the software that there was a problem with certain albums, and been walked through a flow that would fix said problem. Or maybe a link to a support page that'd do the sam…

In Ye Olde Dayes, Macs would in fact give you messages like "error 39!" when something went wrong. Only, in those days, there was almost no way to figure out what that meant.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#410

Post by marcosdumay »

Loughla wrote: post #212
Aardwolf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bathroom scales, kitchen scales and calipers all have versions that work without electricity and aren't much less convenient (if not more convenient since no waiting for electronics to boot up slower than they should or clunky menus)

I disagree. Measurements are funny things depending on the level of detail you need; analog versions of measurements are very clunky when you need precision. (now this is a bit much for bathroom scales and kitchen scales, but it was the calipers that interested me). When I need under .01 precision, my analog calipers just do not do the job as well as my electronic calipers. I can read them, but the last couple of tho…

Hum... Since I've brought a digital caliper that allowed reading sizes with actual 0.01mm precision instead of "guessing it's around X", I've noticed I have no object around that won't compress by something larger than that amount when I apply reasonable amounts of force into the caliper.

I'm also sure it's not calibrated to this level, but that doesn't hurt relative measurements.

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