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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

#51

Post by hemogloben »

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…

Sure, comparing BLE specifically. And Nordics chip / peripheral level documentation is fine, but their software stack documentation (at least as of 3 years ago when I was last working on BLE stuff) is fine at best. They released a new version of the API every 6-12 months with lots of backwards incompatible changes (a new major version every time...), referenced examples from previous API versions (but didn't port them to the new version), and added tons of new poorly documented compile-time config options to every API version.

All told I figured out how to make a reasonably complex chain of bluetooth devices work (largely by reading the source and comparing against old version API documentation to figure out differences), so it definitely could have been worse. But to imply that just because the documentation is BETTER than the competition that it is GOOD?

No. Its fine.

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

#52

Post by qbasic_forever »

monocasa wrote: post #18
exmadscientist wrote: post #9

Nordic 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.

I don't think they wanted an M4 per se, but instead wanted a bluetooth radio to save on the cost of a screen. The Nordic chip just happens to be based around an M4.

IIRC Nordic has a M0 version with bluetooth radio--the BBC micro:bit and a few other maker boards used it. But perhaps it's not really available in cheap quantities anymore and a way overpowered M4 is what they got.

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

#53

Post by ulfw »

Reichhardt wrote: post #47
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

And you need to get your conspiracy theories out of your head.

There is nothing, NOTHING, humanity agrees on. No way in hell would you get 200 odd governments to 'conspire' against you.

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

#54

Post by alvarlagerlof »

Reichhardt wrote: post #47
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Seems today early to me.

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

#55

Post by antoniuschan99 »

numpad0 wrote: post #49
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?

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?

Yea I saw somewhere airtags are just Nordic chips? Kind of surprised because the airpod w1/h1 chips aren’t

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

#56

Post by aeternum »

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.

We've made significant advancements in catalytic converters over the last decade and many waste management centers are able to incinerate much of the trash without the toxic emissions. They can then use magnets and eddy current separators to extract nearly all the metals out of the resulting ash.

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

#57

Post by jakear »

Reichhardt wrote: post #47
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

The first thing to abandon is certainly vax card verifications. I know a handful of anti-vax folks and without fail every single one has printed out a fake vax cards on their home printer and gotten past any and all vax verifiers they encounter. It’s security theater at its most extreme, akin to requiring all websites to display a “your payment is processed securely” message on their payment page.

Consider: if you have some deep set anti-science/anti-government beliefs, and the government says you can’t go into any restaurants unless you submit some science card to them, do you abandon your deep set fears and have yourself injected, or do you search up “print vaccine card” and hit Cmd+P?

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

#58

Post by hedgehog »

mozey wrote: post #43
malwarebytess wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some tests do that but then you end up with a limited list of phones where the camera has been qualified. Better to go all the way to an eye-readable test.

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

#59

Post by LeoPanthera »

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 use case is valid but the solution is completely overkill.

You could do this with an analogue circuit and two LEDs.

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

#60

Post by jraph »

aeternum wrote: post #56
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.

We've made significant advancements in catalytic converters over the last decade and many waste management centers are able to incinerate much of the trash without the toxic emissions. They can then use magnets and eddy current separators to extract nearly all the metals out of the resulting ash.

This is new to me. But even if it's true, it still requires a lot of energy to produce the chip and then apply the waste management you mention.

The best waste is the one that does not exist.

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