Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit | Hacker News Reader

Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit

eetimes.com

28 pointsphatboyslim11 comments

This is the same company that uses the DMCA to shut down calculator hackers and hobbyists? Screw them

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145316.h...

Upvoted, but what the hackers and hobbyists was threatening was the entire viability of the calculators. Here's why.

TI's generally pretty friendly towards people tinkering with the calculators. But what they were doing was breaking the signing keys of the operating system, so a teacher has no idea what the hell's running on a student's calculator at test time. No one wants that, so that calculator becomes forbidden. (The TI92 had a keyboard, and when people realized how easy it was to copy questions off, it became forbidden the next year. Result: any high schooler had a $200 calculator useless for tests.) Enough calculators become forbidden, people lose trust in the brand, and then they stop buying the calculators, which brings the whole system down.

For $100, why tinker with a Z80 processor when you can get a SheevaPlug?

$100 for a calculator is monopoly price, and the fact that every American high-schooler is required to have one just adds insult to injury.

A start-up idea...

A calculator app which can be configured to only perform certain, allowed operations. Teachers could announce that the next test would only allow a particular calculator configuration, and students could run the calc app on their phones/laptops with those restrictions (or none if they didn't want to prepare well for the test). Then, at test time, the teacher passes out purpose built "calculators" running the calc app as configured by the teacher for that test. The calculator would be free, but the teacher kit would be sold to schools. What would be the hardware cost in bulk for a cheap device that could run one TI calculator-like app? If students today can be required to buy a $100 TI calculator, could they be required to buy a flash-able "calculator" device?

Maybe one of the really pissed off people who pre-ordered the WakeMate could take one of these and create their own WakeMate like application.

Bought one today after seeing this thread to make a sleep analysis device and webapp. I am a sleep scientist and I would love to have data of sleep patterns of thousands of people. For accurate yet longer analysis we normally use a commercial product called actiwatch but, as everything in research, is very expensive ( http://tinyurl.com/yhowa64 ).

To keep track of my running workouts, I bought a Timex Ironman Datalink watch which has a USB interface, and I wrote a plug-in for it for SportTracks[1]. It does the job, but it's missing some things.

For one, I'd like to capture ambient temperature too, which this TI watch has, so I took a closer look. The manual states, "The temperature is measured inside the watch right inside the CC430 device. When the watch is worn, the temperature of the watch may be different due to the body heat. For accurate temperature measurements, do not wear the watch and allow a sufficient amount of time for the watch to adapt to the surrounding temperature."

Great feature, poorly implemented. No thanks.

Eventually I'll get a GPS watch, but not until Garmin releases one that has decent battery life. A temperature sensor would be nice, too.

[1] http://www.zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/

History repeats itself:

http://reocities.com/researchtriangle/7650/datalink.html

I already got mine. But I have no time to play with it right now :(

found the idea intriguing and just ordered one, but not sure what I am exactly going to do with it.

As the post above pointed out, don't hack too much. TI is known for throwing down the DMCA law on those who get too "hack" happy with their hardware.

Is this their offer of good will? Perhaps, but it is a little late.

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