61–70 of 143 posts
Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
If you look at the bottom of the page, it’s an advertisement for someone looking for a job to show off his technical skill.
Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
It's already very cheap to build though. We are able to pack a ton of processing into a tiny form factor for little money (comparatively, ignoring end-consumer margins etc.). An earbud that does ANC, supports multiple different audio standard including low battery standby, is somewhat resistant to interference, can send and receive over many meters. That's awesome for the the price. That it has enough processing to r…
(imagine the lunar lander computer being an earbud ha)
Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
Hi, I ported DOOM to the Pinebuds Pro earbuds. It's accessible over the internet, so you can join the queue and play DOOM on my earbuds from your PC! More info as well as links to the github repos can be found on the site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a third option - an economic success that economies of scale have made massively capable hardware the cheapest option for many applications, despite being overkill.
Or the fourth option, an environmental disaster all around
List of Doom ports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doom_ports
Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
The PineBuds are designed and sold as an open firmware platform to allow software experimentation, so there’s nothing bad nor any economic failures going on here. Having a powerful general purpose microcontroller to experiment with is a design goal of the product.
That said, ANC Bluetooth earbuds are not menial products. Doing ANC properly is very complicated. It’s much harder than taking the input from a microphone, inverting the signal, and feeding it into the output. There’s a lot of computation that needs to be done continuously.
Using a powerful microcontroller isn’t a failure, it’s a benefit of having advanced semiconductor processes. Basically anything small and power efficient on a modern process will have no problem running at tens of MHz speeds. You want modern processes for the battery efficiency and you get speed as a bonus.
The speed isn’t wasted, either. Higher clock speeds means lower latency. In a battery powered device having an MCU running at 48MHz may seem excessive until you realize that the faster it finishes every unit of work the sooner it can go to sleep. It’s not always about raw power.
Modern earbuds are complicated. Having a general purpose MCU to allow software updates is much better than trying to get the entire wireless stack, noise cancellation, and everything else completely perfect before spinning out a custom ASIC.
We’re very fortunate to have all of this at our disposal. The groveling about putting powerful microcontrollers into small things ignores the reality of how hard it is to make a bug-free custom ASIC and break even on it relative to spending $0.10 per unit on a proven microcontroller manufacturer at scale.
> Earbuds don't have displays, so the only way to transfer data to/from them is either via bluetooth, or the UART contact pads. Bluetooth is pretty slow, you'd be lucky to get a consistent 1mbps connection, UART is easily the better option. Does this means you can run a doom instance on each bud? Is it viable to make a distributed app to use the computing power of both buds at once?
This was a stretch goal, multiplayer. One earbuds versus the other. It's not that hard to implement but I've got a few other things to clear away first. Using them for distributed computation though? interesting use of free will xD
Left ear for the right eye and vice versa
> Earbuds don't have displays, so the only way to transfer data to/from them is either via bluetooth, or the UART contact pads. Bluetooth is pretty slow, you'd be lucky to get a consistent 1mbps connection, UART is easily the better option. Does this means you can run a doom instance on each bud? Is it viable to make a distributed app to use the computing power of both buds at once?
This was a stretch goal, multiplayer. One earbuds versus the other. It's not that hard to implement but I've got a few other things to clear away first. Using them for distributed computation though? interesting use of free will xD
"VR Doom has been ported to an earbud(s)" ;)