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I can only compare it to FreeScale chips, but one thing that pleasantly surprised me is the flexibility in pin-assignment. Instead of the pin-mux that we'd have to do on the MK24, I could just assign pins during usb/i2c init without any limitations. The SDK is quite elaborate, although sometimes a bit difficult to use in C++.
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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.
But to be honest, when you see what some people believe and how gullible some can be, you won’t get surprised if someone actually claims that these happened and a significant number of people believe it. It’s scary.
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The Abbott test has two lines separated… if two then positive, if one then negative. You don’t even need to tell the colors apart.
You do, however, need color vision to tell that the control line changed from blue to red (which the instructions tell you to do to verify that the test is working correctly)
The control line doesn't show up until the buffer solution has wicked along the test strip, so the verification is "does the line next to the letter C show up?"
The chip is $4. The test is much more expensive than that.
The expensive price of the tests is actually a whole different problem. For the last tests that I bought at Walgreens (InteliSwab) I paid around $25 for two tests. Meanwhile I'm currently in Europe and as a consumer I can buy Antigen tests for around 3 Euro per test (would be less than 2 Euro if bought in bulk). As far as I know those prices are not subsidized.
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.
Why is there any kind of market for this?
I wonder why they didn’t use NFC. They could get away with a much simpler chip, or even a fully analog solution if they didn’t need the complexity of Bluetooth. Seems like you could just about accomplish the same thing with a pair of NFC tokens, a photodiode, and some transistors. Basic components. Connect one of the two NFC chips to the coil depending on how much light is reflected off the test strip. When you scann…
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.
Another view is that it's a great illustration of the relative price trends in the last 50 years. Healthcare has gone way up in price, and tech way down. What was a supercomputer 50 years ago is now a small fraction of the cost of a chemical test (which requires FDA approval).
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.
Electronics must not be disposed with general waste, I'd imagine all Western municipalities have special recycling programs for electrical devices. Not sure if they'd be that happy to receive used covid test kits though.
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.
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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.
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.