I still think that calling it e-paper is disingenuous. My initial impression was that this was some e-ink breakthrough, but it's really just a backlit monochrome LCD. I'm not sure how they can claim that it's "non-emissive", when it literally uses a backlight. An LCD with an amber filter doesn't come close to the readability of e-ink, so I'm not sure what advancements they've made to make it feel like "magic" or "paper-like". Shelling out $729 to find out how it looks in person, based on a slick marketing site and positive comments from "beta testers", is a hard ask.
I don’t see the word transflective anywhere on that Reddit post, and don’t really know what it means. Where did you get that info, or is it obvious from looking at it?
Hmmm, a little disappointed but I'm I still very interested. My favorite smart watch was a pebble and they used a transflective display, I loved it. If this is more of the same but refined and bigger count me in.
Week+ battery life, truly always on, sunlight readable, much smaller size/thickness and thus more comfortable than all other smart watches.
For me, the use case of a smartwatch is notifications. It lets me keep my phone on silent all the time without missing important messages or calls. Proper filtering is important so you don't get notification spam on your wrist but some notifications truly are important and checking them without taking out my phone, and even sending a quick reply, is awesome. I also use the "extend unlock" feature of Android which works with any Bluetooth device but especially well with one that is always on your wrist. Locating a lost phone is another great feature. Timers and alarms are a given of course. Maps navigation directions on your wrist can also be useful (but you get this for free with a proper implementation of notifications).
To me the paradox of the wearables market is that it seems like the only reason people buy them is as fitness trackers which they are actually pretty bad at. The numbers they report might as well be made up in many cases, and the weird metrics they provide aren't useful. The sensors make the watch thicker and less comfortable too. Meanwhile, it's actually super useful to have phone notifications on your wrist, but people don't seem interested, and e.g. Android Wear really sucks at it. (Can't speak for the Apple Watch as I don't have an iPhone, but I've always felt that the hardware design was ugly.)
Look into Amazfit watches. They're about as close as you can get to a Pebble these days. It also has a bunch of fitness stuff (GPS, steps, heart rate), but you can mostly just ignore that. Mine is just for notifications, stopwatch, and telling the time, and a charge still lasts more than 2 weeks on the original 6 year old battery (I've worn it roughly 23/7 since April 2018).
The newer Amazfit Bips sadly don't have transflective displays and do not last a month like the original Bip line used to. Why they killed off the unique feature of this product line and made it another generic LCD smartwatch when Amazfit already has several product lines of those I have no clue.
The cores don't serve the same purpose as the M1 cores. M1 is optimized for single thread at the cost of die size (and a bit of power). I don't have exact numbers, but say the apple M1 core takes 1.5x the die area of N2, the you'd get better performance by putting in 1.5x the number of N2 cores.
Yes. M1 / A14 is also a 5W+ Core. So a different set of trade off.
I mentioned the M1 because it is the question that always comes up and people keep banging on about it. I wish most tech site would simply point this out since they have the reach. But it is obvious neither Apple nor ARM have the interest for their pieces to be named and compared in this way. And I guess tech site wont do this to harm any relationship.
Digikey pricing is not indicative of actual volume pricing, especially for FPGAs where they are often many times overpriced when buying from distributors. I doubt the board is sold at an loss, probably sold at a small profit, not that's it's really significant for a low volume dev board.
The circulator[1] is an analogous component in rf, it send the incident power from any port down to the next port, so you can take one port to be the bidirectional connection, and it splits the signal into transmit and receive connections.
The trick to doing smd soldering is reflow. On all budget all you need is a hot air gun, if you put solder and flux on the pads manually before placing the components. With a stencil and solder paste you can save the time tinning the pads, and placing a component every few seconds is quite possible. So if you work really hard and quite possibly break your back you can assemble this board in a day :)
If you're working with stencil and paste, my understanding is that paste only has a few hours of working time once it's applied, so you have to assemble it in the day.
It takes a combination of software and hardware to get good power consumption. In this case, assuming the author has implemented sleep modes on the microcontroller, it's probably the 3g module being not very power efficient.
[1] https://github.com/LiveContainer/LiveContainer