You know a piece of tech is going to be fun to take apart when it makes you go buy a new set of bits just to be able to open it
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The battery is a 3235mAh 18650 with a 5 wire plug on it.
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I think the display has a backlight, and that thing in the bottom-left looks like an ambient light sensor, but without being able to boot the thing further I can't get it to turn on the backlight.
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This did have a sim card in it when I got it. it's still active.
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@azonenberg @gsuberland @foone every rental scooter board seems to be like this. The sheer lack of cost optimisation insults me.
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And it's got a set of connectors on the back. Presumably whatever scooter this plugged into had some of these, but I don't really know why it needs SO many.
Maybe variants for different types of scooters? At the very least, I think it's hooking into a can bus and power (so it can recharge the battery, since there's no other input)
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Graham Sutherland / Polynomialreplied to Erin 💽✨ last edited by
@erincandescent @foone @azonenberg the design kinda screams rush to market
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@erincandescent @gsuberland @foone Yeah I'm building specialty T&M gear so with a $1K+ ten layer board and a big Xilinx I really don't care about cost optimizing the micros.
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@foone is this one of those funky hybrid lcd/e-paper/"SHARP" displays? or am i just going mad?
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Erin 💽✨replied to Graham Sutherland / Polynomial last edited by
@gsuberland @foone @azonenberg but then they seem to stick around for a while
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@foone it’s be cool to have a virtual cell provider that acts like mitmproxy - so u can pop a special sim into a device and then head to your portal and intercept the network
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@magni yeah I was just thinking about that
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@doskel no, I think it's just a monochrome LCD with a lot of contrast. It doesn't seem to be epaper
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@azonenberg @gsuberland @foone tbh I think 1 MCU per board is often appropriate.
If it just needs to do simple stuff I’ll chuck one of the cheap cute 8051s I bought a big pile of as jellybean MCUs on there and not an ARM core but the fact that I just used “cute” to describe an 8051 probably tells you all you need to know about my sanity
(They’re Nuvoton N76E003s but the newer N76S003 is a cheaper drop in replacement I think. I generally like Nuvoton parts; they’re quite cheap and well documented)
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@erincandescent @gsuberland @foone Yeah on my new designs I usually have a L0/L4 as pmic, a H7 and Xilinx FPGA as the main brain, then a L4 on the power supply board, another on the front panel to run displays and buttons etc... it adds up.
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@foone How do you know what it does/that you can replace it with an off-the-shelf part? I'm confused.
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@azonenberg @gsuberland @foone If I can get away with a cheap 8-bitter in a design these days I often will because I can’t be fucked with all the shit you need to do in order to get your average Cortex-M running properly for a glorified IO expander
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@stilescrisis I recognized it as a GPS/GNSS module, and I've ordered breakout boards for these before. Things like this:
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@foone but isn't it possible theirs has better reception or lower battery consumption or something like that?
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@stilescrisis not really? it's the same chip, they just put a different connector on it.
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Missed a chip! There's an Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 SoC on the back.
That's a Bluetooth/BLE/NFC/Zigbee chip.
(It's also an ARM Cortex M4. )