Man discovers medical device uses a Game Boy display | Hacker News Reader

Man discovers medical device uses a Game Boy display

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20 pointsokket11 comments

It blows my mind that this is what the company ended up using... Why? Normally the price is the factor that chooses what part is used in a system. Surely it would be cheaper to use literally any regular screen than to retrofit a Gameboy SP topcase into your design...

Maybe one of the devs used a gameboy screen to develop on personally, and made a prototype of the product using the knowledge he already had using the gameboy. As a deadline approached and they ran the numbers comparing development cost of a new display system vs sourcing tons of gameboy screens, and gameboy screen sourcing came out cheaper with their predicted number of orders. Or maybe a dev thought it would be funny, I don't know man.

They didn't just take a game boy screen, this is the whole thing.

oh, you're right! That...makes even less sense.

Why?

It makes even more sense. Keeps NRE costs down.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is what happened. Even in medical device development it's not unusual to start out using some piece of hardware "until the real thing is available" and then get so far down the line that when the "real thing" is actually available, it makes more sense to continue with what you started with.

The entire instrument has to be validated anyway, so whether you use a GBA for its display or purchase a standard display isn't really a big deal. If it's price comparable and you can manage the supply chain, go for it. I can see Manufacturing complaining, but that's about it.

Someone on Twitter found a presentation detailing the design of this device https://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmconrad/ECGR6185-2013-01/Present...

> GBA Display used has small size and light weight... GBA Gaming displays have excellent graphics processing capability for plotting... The proposed system has relatively lower cost

This is insane! They even hooked the ECG measurement circuits to the Gameboy via the flash cart!

This is not just the game boy screen, this is the entire GBA as a controller, with custom hardware in the cartridge slot. The GBA is a great embedded system. More power to them!

Right, with thorough documentation, a large deployment of users/testers, and a good bit of power, the largest downside to using a Gameboy as the soul of your product is price.

I guess this means price point was not a concern of this product

I have to think the margin on medical devices is big enough to warrant potentially losing a few bucks on OTS components.

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