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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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:
Gravity: GNSS GPS BeiDou Receiver Module - I2C&UART
This GNSS receiver module from DFRobot supports BeiDou, GPS, QZSS and other multi-satellite systems. It compatible with Arduino, ESP32, micro:bit and Raspberry Pi, which can be widely applied to outdoor positioning scenarios such as vehicle navigation,
(www.dfrobot.com)
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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. ) -
So I searched for "Lyft ebike" and this image came up. Apparently in 2021 they were testing these out, and it looks like the actual released product is basically this thing but inside a plastic enclosure.
So either this is just the internals, or this is a prototype for something they later built.