[HH] A stroy of design tradeoffs in consumer electronics

[Tom Metro]

M. Elizabeth Scott guest blogs on adafruit about the process of
developing an embedded consumer device - a game consisting of several
wireless "game cubes", each with a small LCD display, and a central
controller.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/05/how-we-built-a-super-nintendo-out-of-a-wireless-keyboard-sifteo-sifteo/

It's an interesting and detailed account of the hardware selection and
design trade-offs needed to make a device that can meet the price
targets of a consumer product.

What was particularly interesting were the author's description of how
she borrowed coding techniques from 1980's era video game consoles in
order to squeeze the most performance and capability out of low-end CPUs
(typically used in wireless keyboards) and minimal RAM.


The author has some equally detailed project descriptions on her site:

http://scanlime.org/

covering things such as X-10, an RFID tag made with a hand-wound antenna
and duct tape, several postings on the propeller microcontroller, how
cheap Bluetooth adapters sometimes have fake antennas[1], and a custom
hacked vibrator remote control[2] that uses ultrasonic sensors in a
theremin-like[2] fashion (actually a good write up of wireless protocol
reverse engineering).

1. http://scanlime.org/2010/04/failed-antenna-design-101/
2. http://scanlime.org/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin

 -Tom