Oscilloscope watch ships after 10 years on Kickstarter
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
When the day came the dude showed up with a laptop attached to a small box and a number of leads. I said to him[1] "hey there, I'm an engineer, would you mind telling me how this study works" and he (delighted) explained to me that although his title was a professor of neurology he was actually a biomedical engineer and the procedure was hooking me up to an oscilloscope and sending currents down the various nerves of my arm to see whether (or not) they were detectable on the oscilloscope and therefore being conducted properly down the nerves. So I spent 30mins or so having various electric shocks applied to my arm and looking at the pictures on the (very fancy) oscilloscope while shooting the breeze about medical imaging and machine learning with this professor.
The procedure was mildly unpleasant but super-interesting as a result.
[1] Sort of as a coping strategy because I expected it to be painful.
I try to not clamp and neither lean much on the handlebars. So I have to move my hips and body a bit, but I do see improvement in handling. If I hit a pothole or debris, the bike will autocorrect much better if there's less pressure on the handlebars/front wheel.
Unfortunately vibration-induced Raynaud's syndrome has no cure, so it may be continuing to affect you.
I also have Raynaud's which affects me when cycling or when using an outboard throttle for extended periods. Apart from hand exercises which delays onset of symptoms, there's apparently nothing to be done.
I'm looking at a pair of leather-over-foam paddings integrated with the grips themselves like I have on a tandem where I noticed I don't have that problem. But that particular model has proven hard to find.
Long version in case this helps someone: I have hypermobile-type Ehlers-Danloss syndrome, which is a disorder affecting the body's connective tissue. Among other things it means I'm more bendy than I should be. As a consequence I have to be careful not to make too extreme movements because I can injure my joints. In this case, the problem was because I wasn't utilizing my full range of movement, my nerves were essentially getting stuck in various places where they travel through small gaps or over tendons or whatnot. The solution is to do (gentle) stretching-type exercises which are designed to make the tendons do their full range of movement (I have to do this carefully so as not to hyperextend and injure myself), which causes the nerve to be pulled through these gaps and unstick itself. Because this process is like floss being drawn through a gap between teeth, the exercises are actually called "flossing" by physios
Here's an example specifically in the domain of sciatica, although that's not what I do[1]
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/nerve-flossing#exe...
1. check the bike fit (probably the main problem)
2. add some mobility / core training (at some point if You bike long distance out of the blue without much training, some bits in Your body will simply break / strain no matter how good Your bike fit is)
3. in case of problems, look up the terms "cyclist palsy" and "ulnar / median nerve flossing exercises". It should help recover a bit quicker.
All that being said, I'm typing this with a pretty severely tingling median nerves in both hands. 1200km in 86h without much training during the season and with an improperly adjusted saddle (didn't mark the position before packing the bike for transport). Yeah, do as I say, not as I do.
(2) I do thousands of km / year on my bikes (140 just this weekend), but I do recognize that it may be too limited by itself and it's true that I don't do many other things besides biking, walking stairs and sitting all day. So some more variation might help. Thank you for the tip!
(3) Interesting, I know about the ulnar nerve and have had issues there on one hand but that was long ago and not nearly as bad as this. It also seems as though it was originally triggered by the use of a jackhammer (someone else pointed this out downthread, that vibration may be the trigger, I was focusing on pressure rather than vibration, and I never made that link before). 1200 km in 86 hours???? that is insane. Best I've ever done was 300 in 24 and that was in my prime on a really light bike (cycle around the IJsselmeer inside a day). I wouldn't even think about doing 1000+ in less than 5 days today.
Lots of good stuff in this thread, thank you all!
(2) the distance alone is just part of the job. I do about 5.000km a year just on the 2x10km a day commute. That's got little to do with mobility / intensity though. And does little to posture. For me,I kinda regret now doing only a couple of 200km+/day low intensity rides this season. This would have revealed the problems much earlier...
(3) 1200km is Paris-Brest-Paris. The time limit for that one is 90h, so 86 is "barely just made it". But I went full bikepacking on this one. Took way too much gear, which slowed me down a lot in the climbs. Also, couldn't use my aerobars in the groups, which put way more stress on my wrists than I thought it would. In the end, it's the combination of vibration / limited options for hand position change / too much weight (fault of weak core muscles / posture) and the long continuous repetitive stress that does the damage.
That's very apt, and likewise. I see a new bike as the beginning of a long journey to where it is all set up and tweaked to just how I want it. Also: most bikes straight from the factory are rough ideas of what you could do with it and as a rule need all kinds of tightening, especially spokes and various friction grips. Also not rare to find cables that are too long / untrimmed, electrical bits that are so loose they can get trapped, loose bolts (and even sometimes missing ones). Think of it as an almost but not quite assembled kit and you wouldn't be too far off. I also probably have about a bike's worth of spare parts in every category and more than one in some (pedals, kickstands, saddle pins, pinions, handle bars etc).
> the distance alone is just part of the job. I do about 5.000km a year just on the 2x10km a day commute.
That's still quite a bit of good training. A family member does 2x30 km 6 days per week, 48 weeks / year. He should probably do bike reviews :)
> For me,I kinda regret now doing only a couple of 200km+/day low intensity rides this season. This would have revealed the problems much earlier...
I do a 2x70 once, sometimes twice weekly and on that distance most issues will show. I also can't do much longer anyway without breaking it up (knee issue, lots of steel in one leg). It's one reason my e-bike sees more work these days than the regular one.
> 1200km is Paris-Brest-Paris. The time limit for that one is 90h, so 86 is "barely just made it".
To me that is far out of reach, consider me seriously impressed with this.
> But I went full bikepacking on this one.
Even more impressed!
> Took way too much gear, which slowed me down a lot in the climbs.
Yes, weight is killing. We have a tandem here and I take my sons on rides with it and uphill you might as well be walking (which we sometimes do).
I don't like riding in groups at all, these are all solo rides or with one child.
Probably wouldn't hurt to second-check these days.
My $.02 : Cam Nichols for bike fit tips (and a wonderful aussie accent :-) and Dylan Johnson for science checks and backwards cap comments ;-)
My issue was a combination of a previous shoulder injury and bad sleeping position and bad sitting at desk position (resting forearm on the edge) that would result in numbness in my hand and fingers.
I'm more conscious of how I sit and sleep now (as much as you can be "conscious" of how you sleep!) and I started indoor rock climbing which has really transformed my upper body in terms of arm, shoulder and back strength and mobility. Funny, I don't look any different, but I can hold onto and hang off things well good. :P
I hope you have the same problem I did, was an easy fix.
Lack of B6 can cause peripheral neuropathy which has symptoms like you describe. Can be linked to diabetes, some metals and B6 deficiency.
I've run into this when doing a more complex stack and neglecting to check the level of the B6 in the various sources.
Never again! I will deal with whatever life throws at me (including my tingling fingers), before I go through that again. The doctors were so scared of the way I looked when they were done (white as a sheet and listless), that they had me lie down in a side room for about an hour, before they would let me leave. That was my own private version of hell.
You mention below "almost completely resolved by physiotherapy exercises", and that is where I'm at now, thankfully. In the future, I'll exhaust this resource before ever doing more invasive studies.
Gabe (the guy making the oscilloscope watch) sent updates every few days for the first month or so, then roughly monthly into 2014, then a few times in 2015, then a pause, and then a few updates in late 2018 and early 2019. After that, it was radio silence for over four years until July 30th of this year, announcing that the devices were actually going to ship.
To say I never expected to actually get the watch after, say, 2015 would understate things considerably. In fairness, I still have yet to actually receive it.
How is this legal?
It is hard to distinguish it from frauds (e.g. what Holmes and Theranos committed) nevertheless it should be legal.
I believe there is a difference between promising something that you know can't be done, and promising something that can be done, but failing to do it within time/budget.
Even promising something that can’t be done need not be fraud because the developer can have reasonable arguments that it can’t be done yet.
Even if the developer has doubts as to whether they will be able to do it, or even whether it actually is possible, it’s not fraud if they clearly outline the risks.
True, but that wasn't the case with Theranos. Every domain expert knew that you couldn't possibly analyse everything using a drop of blood, because blood is not homogeneous, so one drop from your left arm is not necessarily the same as another drop from your right arm. This is a fundamental limitation of human anatomy, not something to do with the current state of technology.
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store
https://www.kickstarter.com/rules?ref=global-footer
So, within the rules: it is 'an obligation-free playground for tinkerers' more than it is a place where you can buy cool stuff that doesn't exist yet.
And in this particular case it worked exactly as it should. Obviously there are some Kickstarters that are fraudulent, where the initiator has no intention up front to ever release what they say they intend to build. But those are indistinguishable from your typical other failed Kickstarter, the one where the ability or funds did not reach far enough to stretch to the point where something tangible got delivered.
If you want to be 100% sure you get what you back: don't use Kickstarter, you will almost certainly be disappointed. If you want to back people that have the intention of doing interesting things with low expectations of actually receiving that which you back Kickstarter is fine.
A very strict reading of the rules means that Kickstarter can be exactly that: an obligation-free playground for tinkerers, who may at some point deliver something back to you in return for the money you give them. Your 'backing' is essentially a donation, there is a pinky promise that the recipient will try to do what they can to deliver on their intentions.
Some projects are more up-front about this than others, but in general it helps to understand the kind of arrangement you are entering into before deciding to back any kind of project.
This is the project page for this watch:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-...
The timetable seems - to the hardware oriented part of my brain - wildly optimistic. Otoh 10 years is probably much longer than the original project was intended to run, likely there were serious troubles sourcing parts and/or with the final design. But the person behind the project felt that in spite of that headwind they still were obliged to deliver, even if that happened much, much later than intended. I wished all Kickstarters would end as happy as this one.
https://help.kickstarter.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005048113-...
So: other than a 'gentle-mans agreement' you do not have much to go on in terms of rights. Finally: the amount of money raised for this project is so low that I'm surprised it managed to run to completion at all.
Now of course anyone with any smarts runs a Kickstarter through an LLC to avoid being liable but it isn't a completely free space.
Think of it like preordering from a local store. If they go bankrupt you are SOL.
Kickstarter just isn't the one taking on the risk in contrast to, say, buying from a random merchant on Amazon works. Where Amazon guarantees completion (as well as it is willing to).
Now if a nationwide Kickstarter runs and fails is the original developer's LLC impossible to sue if they don't deliver as long as they take reasonable steps towards delivery? 100%.
But again there is a difference between a contract with a random and a playground.
Where does it say that?
> Think of it like preordering from a local store.
No, again: Kickstarter is not a store. How is it even possible to have this level of misunderstanding when it says exactly that on the linked page.
https://help.kickstarter.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005028834-...
"At the same time, backers must understand that Kickstarter is not a store. When you back a project on Kickstarter, you’re helping create something new — not pre-ordering something that already exists. As Kickstarter does not offer refunds, we encourage backers to investigate the project idea first, to vet the creator thoroughly, and to assess the inherent risk of the project for themselves before making a pledge.
There’s always a chance something could happen that prevents the creator from being able to finish the project as promised. "
And that's from the current terms of service, the previous ones (which were in effect when this project launched) were even more lenient. And that's also why it is called a 'pledge' and not a 'sale'.
Has anyone successfully sued a project? Is there case law?
The filing fee for small claims court is usually $20 and that assumes you live near each other.
They are usually judgement proof but that isn't uncommon in other fields too.
If the backers 'back out' because they see that risk as too high retrospectively they should not have engaged in the first place. Because you are out only $50 or less. But collectively you've enabled someone to take on a risk that they could not have carried by themselves, as a backer you underwrite that risk. This is such a fundamental component of crowdsourcing that I find it bizarre that it needs to be spelled out like this. Legal recourse should be reserved for outright fraud, no less.
Examples:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/feds-take-first-... (most likely fraud)
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/32334/court-orders-fines... (seems to have been either bad timing or someone that needed the court to get off their ass)
https://massivelyop.com/2022/10/12/chronicles-of-elyria-dev-... (many millions of $, case dismissed)
So it's a bit of a toss-up. Especially the second is weird because the state is awarded $54K versus a pittance to the backers and apparently the backers did in fact receive their stuff.
All in all, other than outright fraud I don't see much in terms of real world recourse here, and even then you have to wonder if you shouldn't just write it off. The last one is interesting: by handing a lot of $ to a project initiator you are also effectively funding them from defending from you suing them...
Well, the Terms of Use[1] in force at the time make it pretty clear:
> By creating a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, you as the Project Creator are offering the public the opportunity to enter into a contract with you.
And later on, it suggests backers should expect rewards promised or their money back:
> Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.
Obviously you and I know better than to expect these to happen, but lets not pretend like everyone participating should have known they were bearing equity-like risk.
> The Estimated Delivery Date listed on each reward is not a promise to fulfill by that date, but is merely an estimate of when the Project Creator hopes to fulfill by. Project Creators agree to make a good faith attempt to fulfill each reward by its Estimated Delivery Date
The point of this site is to gather enough money to make a good faith attempt at something. That's pretty obvious. Even an LLM can figure that out.
Normally you have a right to a full refund if a date is specified and missed (specifically you can liquidate the contract for failure to fulfill which allows you to retrieve your consideration). But pretty much everybody ensures the contract avoids that by either specifying damages for a missed date (which avoids full liquidation) or specifies that no real date is for open ended projects.
Note that with no end date you can still sue for failure to uphold if say updates stop.
People do Kickstarters without vetting as to their business acumen, skills, planning capabilities, ability to source components, product safety knowledge and so on. This dramatically changes the situation from ordering a good from a store or company and you should adjust your expectation as to delivery, quality of workmanship, product safety and guarantees accordingly.
It is precisely why I've never done a Kickstarter even if there have been multiple occasions where people indicated they would love it if I did that. But I could see the potential trouble down the line with some clarity: I could easily put in a ton of effort, ultimately fail through some unknown factor and still be morally (and in some jurisdictions even legally) on the hook for either the delivery or a refund. This has such a chilling effect that it never even was a consideration to try. And that's precisely what Kickstarter is: to give people a chance to try to achieve their goal. Best effort, at best, and success as a lucky nice-to-have.
And that's why I'm more than happy to back some projects that have low chance of success but where I hope that the initiator will either learn something or in an odd case that it will result in something tangible. I'm pleasantly surprised when it works and I don't sweat it when it doesn't. And I think that's the best match attitude wise for what Kickstarter offers, higher expectations than that and you will be disappointed.
So they push the responsibility back for to the project creators rather than that they, as middle-men properly inform the counterparty. In that sense they are clearly and unambiguously on the side of the creators and not on the side of the backers. This is smart from their perspective in a monetary sense, but ethically it leaves something to be desired: they could easily do a better job here and they have more than enough data to support the thesis that Kickstarter projects can and do fail. Note that Kickstarter defines 'success' as 'got funded', not as 'delivered on the pledges'. As far as Kickstarter is concerned, when you're funded they're done.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Delivery-rate-for-Kickst...
A good 40% of all Kickstarters does not deliver anything, ever. And the remaining 60% is split 50/50 between those that delivered on time and those that delivered at all. And that split can differ substantially between one kind of Kickstarter and another, hardware in particular is difficult and has a high failure rate, even for projects with massive backing.
So, I'm not blaming the project initiators as much as I do Kickstarter, they clearly can do much better at informing potential backers of what they are getting into and the failure rate of projects (do deliver) within that particular segment, independent of the particular initiator (though their reputation could change that) should be prominently displayed on the pledge page. I won't hold my breath for that to happen though. Never trust a man etc...
Again this is why you run the Kickstarter through a bespoke LLC as that shields you from liability if you can't deliver.
Having a bankrupt LLC makes you judgement proof and thus un-sueable unless they can pierce through the corporate veil because you committed fraud or something similarly terrible.
Again it can both be true that they legally must deliver but there is nothing you can do if they don't.
There is fairly high correlation between Kickstarters that are run through a bespoke LLC and Kickstarters that fail to deliver, for me that would be a reason not to back a certain Kickstarter.
I see Kickstarters mostly as a way to spend a tiny bit of money to enable particular artists and hackers to pursue their dreams, a subsidy of sorts. And if it ever does result in a thing delivered to my door I'll be pleasantly surprised but my expectations are low and the stats to date mirror the larger stats available about campaigns fairly closely. Approaching Kickstarter in any other way will surely lead to disappointment. Suing someone because they failed on a project would radically change the nature of Kickstarter and even though it has happened I would like to see these reserved for those cases where the initiator clearly never planned to deliver anything in the first place. These happen often enough that it is a real problem.
> I'm not blaming the project initiators as much as I do Kickstarter
You entered this thread blaming _backers_, caveat emptor style. All the stuff you mentioned upthread was added / changed post 'day #1'. You can even read the discussion on HN from the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4551245. In 2023 "don't kickstart with money you can't afford to lose" is reasonable but in 2012 the terrain was much foggier.
The reality is: 40% of Kickstarters never deliver. And only a very small fraction of those results in refunds. An even smaller fraction results in legal action and only a small fraction of those results in payouts to the original backers in excess of their legal costs. So even if you are right in the narrowest possible sense the fact remains that if a Kickstarter does not deliver you are likely going to lose your money.
Backers should be aware of this, should never back a project with money they can't afford to lose and should assume that there is a 40% or so chance that their money will be gone.
In 2012 there were enough people saying the same thing. This all started with arguments that Kickstarter is pre-ordering and that it functions as a store. Neither of these are true.
The simple reality is that you are giving a bunch of money to a bunch of strangers who will possibly try to deliver on that which they have pinky promised to do. And that there is a very good chance that they will not. And that there is a very good chance that you will not be able - legally or otherwise - to recover your funds.
The 40% can be divided into a couple of fractions: projects that failed but where the initiator tried their hardest, projects that failed where the initiator did not try their hardest but they did make some token effort and they delivered something (broken, useless, incomplete, swag only but not the main product that was the goal of the Kickstarter in the first place) and Kickstarters where the initiators never had a chance to deliver because they underestimated the complexity or were underfunded from day 1 and finally those that are simply fraudulent where the Kickstarter itself was the goal, and not the thing the Kickstarter was about.
In all of these you probably will not see your money again and this has been the case since the earliest days of Kickstarter.
Kickstarter could - and should - do more to inform users of these stats. Kickstarter could - and should - do more to keep the backers safe from fly by night operators, but this would require Kickstarter to do more in terms of due diligence on the initiators, and that in turn could increase their liability. They have always tried to make it seem like they don't have anything to do with the actual interaction even though they are to all intents and purposes the advertisers, middle men, and merchant of record.
There are a few cases - that made the news, anyway - where backers have managed to retrieve some of the funds of the Kickstarter project initiators, usually using consumer protection laws. But this is not a structural thing and is more the exception that proves the rule: if the Kickstarter doesn't deliver your money is gone.
So: Kickstarter is 'an obligation-free playground for tinkerers' far more than it is a store, and far more than a place where you should have high expectations of seeing your money or a product in return for your money. Backing a project is not the same as buying a product. Fraud and failure happen, you likely will have little or no recourse.
To the extent that is the case, rewards shouldn't be dependent on success (or the project should be an independent business such that bankruptcy contains liability in the case of failure.)
Also, some Kickstarters are fully developed products from established firms for which the project goal and stretch goals are set around well-researched production costs.
The second I think is mostly abuse of the Kickstarter mechanism to push it more towards pre-ordering and marketing. It would be better if Kickstarter would not engage in these even if they improve the stats because it raises expectations for the kind of projects that Kickstarter was created for to begin with to unrealistic levels.
Is that how it works for angel investors too?
Investments usually result in an ownership transfer though which doesn't have the same kind of hard stops necessarily.
And investments do not necessarily result in an ownership transfer, at the seed and angel level convertible loans effectively postpone that transfer, possibly in perpetuity unless the business manages to raise a later round. Because everybody involved recognizes that if that doesn't happen there is no point in engaging in the song-and-dance of ownership transfer at a non-realistic valuation.
Your typical start-up team is far more capable in terms of business savvy than your typical Bickstarter initiator (artists, tinkerers, hobbyists, wannabe entrepreneurs) and they tend to be much less sure of their ability to bring the project to term. They will most likely underestimate their costs and runtime, overestimate their ability and availability of parts. This should factor heavily into the decision of whether or not you want to back a Kickstarter at all, no matter what the desirable features of the gadget are.
I'm glad something like this exists in the world so that other people like me can do this together with me.
I really wish people like you wouldn't use this sort of site. If you wouldn't be okay with the effort failing, then please just go elsewhere.
At the same time I've seen things come by on Kickstarter that I think they should have never accepted in the first place. They were 100% sure to fail.
However, it is simply not true that it is "obligation-free". This is inaccurate.
Kickstarter say:
> When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward. Once a creator has done so, they’ve satisfied their obligation to their backers.
> The creator is solely responsible for fulfilling the promises made in their project. If they’re unable to satisfy the terms of this agreement, they may be subject to legal action by backers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/section4?ref=faq-basics_creatoro...
And anybody can be subject to legal action for any reason at any time. Whether it sticks or not is another thing and since there is no agreement between backer and initiator (no matter how much Kickstarter would like that to be, they are 'the merchant of record' and so are effectively on the hook). If Kickstarter pays out and the backers charge back (which is an operational risk for any party such as Kickstarter and one way in which they can be defrauded) they would have a very hard time recovering the funds from the initiator for that exact reason.
So this whole thing assumes a lot of trust and goodwill on all sides and is legally more than just a little bit gray. And that's why they are very, very careful not to label anybody a 'buyer'. Because buyers have rights, backers do not.
Morally the backers also have obligations: they should research the initiators, but almost nobody ever does. They should reflect on the feasibility of the proposal, but instead the 'it would be great to have this' feeling combined with 'wow, that's cheap, they can't possibly make it for that kind of money so let's back this' is a near certain path to disappointment.
Kickstarter is the main party that has obligations but they disavow all of these and obviously they have the legal backing to ensure they are not on the hook for any of this. On top of that they keep backers structurally in the dark about the risks.
Edit: a short afterword: I've had many, many requests to do a Kickstarter for the Lego sorting machine. I could have raised millions of $ with ease for this project. And I didn't do it. The reasons why are because I know the difference between making a prototype and making something aimed at the general public, I realized that people's expectations of delivery are unrealistically high because there are a lot of unknowns in a project like that and finally that I would not want to risk my reputation and existing business on a project like that. But not all Kickstarter initiators have that much experience in industry and even if they self evaluate to 'I can do this' it may simply not be true in practice. This is the bulk of the Kickstarters that fail on the delivery. To then demand the money back would put these people in a hole that they won't recover from for the rest of their lives. So the default should be: project fails, backers lose their $ because the same thing that allows Kickstarters to succeed is what would put the initiators of failed projects in the poorhouse: it's $50 for you but $50,000 for the initiator (or more) and once that money is sunk it is not recoverable.
SPY grew 12.197% annually (including dividend reinvestment) from October 2013 to August 2023.
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
>and returned you still a $100 watch for your $100
$100 in 2013 is not the same as $100 in 2023 due to inflation. Adjusting for inflation, the SPY annual return from the same time period (with dividend reinvestment) is 9.216%.
It's also a niche, specialist hardware project made in extremely small quantities. They probably should have charged more, not less.
You are probably right it was a raw deal for them, but likely there just isn't enough demand for a price point that would make this sort of project a good investment.
Also it wasn't from scratch but evolution of
https://www.gabotronics.com/products/57/xmega-xprotolab-deta...
author already made 2 kickstarters before
And I'm glad to see its shipping. Mine is a curio now, I don't really need it - but its fun to use for debugging occasionally.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2010/07/22/rough-justice
The article, which is about the real subject of american incarceration rate, present those dudes as innocent bystanders commiting a minor offence which should not even be an offence. On the other hand, these guys have been illegaly exploiting wild life in a foreign country for almost a decade and got jailed.
Nothing to see here.
I'd also still have all that Tesla, AMD and Nvidia stock
In fact, a 10 year prison sentence would have me walking out with tens of millions of dollars.
I could just imagine, blowing the dust off my laptop and logging into my Schwab account... My Tesla holdings alone would be like 7 million, lol
Does your fantasy include the website telling you your browser is unsupported followed by several hours of installing updates?
Explain to the probation officer why they're searching for luxury homes while sleeping on their brother's couch
Coming to the realization that it was the act of doing absolutely nothing that made them rich.
I bet it's happened before.
I've "kickstarted" a few projects that didn't go anywhere (yet?), and the toil it can be for the creator can be really bad. Of course you don't want to rip your customers but if you are doing this on your spare time and when a project drags over a decade over projected timeline sucks, having it constantly in the back of your mind.
I can feel burdened by my own personal projects that don't get anywhere and those are only for me and I haven't spend anyone else's money either.
Super happy with how it ended up turning out and the runners of the project kept us updated Monthly without fail with actual, candid updates.
I still love my UHKs and use them every day.
(I don't have a UHK and though I looked before I don't think it's for me, just saying.)
The function keys are a bit more of a pain, but once again it's a thumb press + number (1->F1 etc). I'm more inconvenienced by eclipse and visual studio not having the same button for debug-step-over than actually pushing the thing.
I'd miss FX keys too, I use them a lot in window manager desktop switching.
Despite being two keypresses, this is usually faster to type, or at the least to return to home position from, and those keys are probably more consistently placed than the ESC key between vendors / models.
Although I'd also recommend making Esc available on a thumb cluster.
ctrl [ works everywhere vim is installed - no customisation required at all.
Kickstarters can be a wild ride sometimes (-:
It is a terribly interesting desktop gadget that I've used for debugging a couple of times. My favourite thing to do is to wrap my code in view with gpio on/off blips, and measure the performance of things .. the Oscilloscope watch is good for that.
Mine has a terrible 3D printed case, which broke almost instantly, but I don't intend to wear it much unless I get the better case .. perhaps eventually.
The quirky charm of the most long-standing crowdfunding toy in my collection (of many) has its place in my daily life. I mostly just use it to tell time.
:)
If you take all the critical chips out of an oscilloscope, remove the silicon dice from their encapsulation, you still take up more area than any smartwatch. Just the main processor is typically larger than an Apple watch. On top of that you need 1-2 ADC chips of a similar size, several hundred MB of RAM chips, a ton of discrete components that form the very sensitive frontend, then you also need a battery and a display, ports, and mounting hardware.
This is like saying Intel has been selling i7 processors for decades, so they should be able to pack it into a watch.
Packing an oscilloscope into a watch is several orders of magnitude more complex than you seem to think. Oscilloscopes of any configuration are many orders of magnitude more complex than you imply here.
I think you’re overestimating the functionality of this smartwatch.
They didn’t really make a full oscilloscope with hundreds of megabytes of RAM and high sample rates and many effective bits of precision.
They just used a microcontroller with a built-in ADC and exposed those ADC inputs with some input protection and filtering. Yes it’s more than a watch, but making a simple oscilloscope out of a micro with an ADC is a relatively simple EE project. It’s often done as a small project for EE students.
The real challenge was making a UI, packaging it, and shipping a hardware project to a small number of people.
This is the website where you can see the product line up: https://www.gabotronics.com/
Of course this isn't a full featured oscilloscope, it never promised to be one.
I backed a game that was announced 10 years ago (in exactly 58 days) that still hasn't released: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1183462809/paradise-los...
It's been so long that the consoles it was announced for don't exist any more.
Anyone remember the Wii U, and the OUYA?
As far as I understand, they had already made a bunch of the game, then their programmer left and they had to find a new programmer and start again, then there was engine ports, and a side project, and etc..., and covid, and etc...
The lack of observable progress and long gaps between release notes made the community comments devolve into absolute toxicity.
Strangely enough, if it ever does come out I think the press of a game that has taken over a decade to build might give it some more attention than it otherwise would have received.
Apparently they're still working on it.
The other game I backed (that was made by a guy with heart condition who wanted to leave something behind before he kicked the bucket) did come out and it was awesome: https://store.steampowered.com/app/257850/Hyper_Light_Drifte...
(the guy ended up surviving and is continuing to work in game dev)
That said, every time someone mentions the Clang software package I think "wait, that game is still around?"
(Also, an e-ink scope is going to be rather sluggish.)
... proof that I'm a cynical jerk who's missing out. Maybe the things I backed 8-10 years ago that taught me this lesson will actually be headed my way any day now!
Overall my policy is I would back works of art on Kickstarter, but never any item where I'm not absolutely positive "Figure out how to actually make X" is NOT one of the steps on their plan.
But the Golden age is over and it's mainly scams, free marketing and rebranded Chinese OEM stuff now.
To this day there's nothing I'm aware of that provides similar functionality (7+ day battery life, custom code/watch faces, water proof, apple compatible)
With my silly thermometer example I meant: you can boil water, measure the temperature and derive the atmospheric pressure and altitude. Should have probably worded that clearer.
Edit: and yes I understand what you are saying. Internally the scope measures voltage using the current that’s flowing across something with a very high resistance.
And good morning to you.
https://twitter.com/BitBangingBytes/status/16951921773101509...
If you accept the look (which you did if you bought it) 3D printing seems like a no brainer for this project.
7.125GHz
8x or 6x 9.851GSPS DACs
8x 2.95GSPS and 2x 5.9GSPS ADCs or 6x 5.9GSPS
OK, so that's the dev kit and the part itself is probably only about half that, but it's still necessarily going to be a very, very expensive one.
Even though this has already been created -- I think it would be an interesting project to attempt to create one's own oscilloscope watch...
Functionally, it's just a 3D printed watch case, watch bands, an 8-bit microcontroller, LCD screen, battery, oscilloscope probes, a little bit of custom software, and some circuitry to block excessive currents...
Oh sure, it would probably be much easier (and cheaper!) to buy this than make one -- but I think it would be highly interesting to learn what goes into making one...
Any serious student of electronics should, as a project, make their own oscilloscope... it would be a great teaching project!
All of that being said, kudos to the inventor of this excellent oscilloscope watch, it looks really cool -- you'll probably sell a whole bunch of them! So, well done!
Scope with 8-bit resolution is a logic analyzer with delusions of grandeur. 16 bits is realistically the useful minimum; if you want to do scaling in digital rather than the analogue front-end, you'll want 24 which is significantly more expensive. So you want at the very least a 16-bit microcontroller and in practice just an ARM.
Next question is what you want to do about capture rate. 20MHz would be nice, the standard for thirty year old CRT scopes, but realistically audio frequency or 1MHz is going to be about the most you can do.
TBH, something that can capture I2C and SPI and audio frequency does actually cover some useful use cases. Might be fun to give it a 3.5mm stereo jack for the probes or direct audio input.
> some circuitry to block excessive currents
The scope is high-impedance so this shouldn't normally be a problem. (You're not going to have a 50 ohm BNC input on a watch).
You might want to think about voltage, but the sort of person who decides they want to look at the mains frequency cycle on a device strapped to their wrist won't be deterred by warning stickers.
Having said that you are right, I don't expect this ADC to work as a decent oscilloscope.
You've just reminded me that when I got an oscilloscope to play around with, I found out — by accident and to my surprise — that my body was coupled to the mains frequency strongly enough to see it clearly just by touching the probe.
The scope of this article/project (pardon the pun!) -- was to make a an actual scope -- that is, an oscilloscope and an oscilloscope only(!)
NOT a full blown logic analyzer!
A logic analyzer, for those who do not know what the difference is, is sort of a "deluxe" scope, with additional high end "luxury" and extended features and capabilities that are typically limited or not available on a simple oscilloscope...
You have oscilloscopes on the one hand, logic analyzers on the other...
Just like you have Volkswagen Beetles on the one hand, Ferraris on the other.
Or, Priuses on the one hand, and Teslas on the other...
Bicycles and other simple transportation devices on the one hand, Cars, Trains, Planes and other much more elaborate transportation devices -- on the other...
So yes, I agree with the generalized statement: "Scope with 8-bit resolution is a logic analyzer with delusions of grandeur."
But we are NOT trying to build a full-blown, full-featured costly and expensive logic analyzer here...
No, we are only simply trying to build a simple oscilloscope...
Now, don't get me wrong, your comments are certainly valuable, and all of them are apropos for the building and construction of high-end logic analyzers...
And, I'm sure that anyone who would design a logic analyzer or put themselves to designing one now or in the future -- would greatly appreciate them!
But (and I'm sure you'll pardon the pun!) -- a full-blown logic analyzer -- is a little bit out of the -- scope -- (the oscilloscope that is!) -- of this project! <g> :-) <g>
I did get burned by Panono, which is 3D ball camera, who took a long time and got bought out after running out of money. Who offered discount on new camera model that was much more expensive. I had already bought one of consumer 3D cameras which was much cheaper if lower resolution.
So it comes with current probe built into the band?