441–450 of 673 posts
It feels like we’ve turned every physical object into a distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for decades, except now it can also crash.
Disposable vapes waste have big environmental impact. Use regular vapes with e-juice
It upsets me that disposable vapes are not more prohibited. Where I live I often find vapes discarded in parks and other areas where they can be a fire hazard.
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My first guess was debouncing. They assume that the switches are worn out, deeply weathered, and cheaply made. Each press will cause the signal to oscillate and they're taking their sweet time to register it. When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire time, yes, but the same as the day it w…
That's a good point. When I use them I assume they're making API calls to a central server to validate (or something) them.
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> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate numbe…
There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good. "Key presses are 15x sl…
Most software sucks, even when people have to chose using it. Everything is buggy and slow, people are just used to software being bad.
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Most countries don't do enough at all. For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down,…
> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.
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Or maybe they think they should be sending each keystroke to a server and waiting for the response.
A server on Mars?
We can make crazy latency ourselves just fine, no space transmission necessary
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> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too. I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
We're not talking about alcohol or tobacco prohibition. We're talking about single use e-waste prohibition.
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PCs are orders of magnitude more complex, with a lot more to break. Sounds like a whole lot of work for… what? Assuming the internet connection and AWS work of course. Which they won’t always, then oops.
If you're relying on AWS you either way have a "PC" to relay communication between AWS and the keycard readers & door latches.
For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM! To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81…