> It even has a cute unboxing experience (The box plays the intel jingle when you open it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc
That's very cute, however if it's the box that actually plays the sound isn't it terribly wasteful, ecologically?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc
That's very cute, however if it's the box that actually plays the sound isn't it terribly wasteful, ecologically?
I remember way back I was trying to make a cheap wifi-powered box with a display that could play short video's and stuff. The base idea came from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywr0A2aC_Jk, and I'd use a very cheap 3g-wifi router running openwrt as base. But in the end the firmware changed and made it impossible.
But nowadays with an arduino mini pro, i2c, cheap small displays or audio modules you can get a long way! It does however require you to purchase a lot of stuff like resistors, opamps, breadboards.. etc. And in theory, with the ESP8266-module you could make any device internet-connected.
How so? It makes the box unrecyclable; worse still, as soon as such an item is detected in the recycling plant it will often cause the whole batch of material to be rejected and dumped[1].
No-one has time to pick-through cardboard removing batteries and circuitry.
[1] Source: anecdote from a colleague who worked in a 'recyclarium'. Contaminated material causes the line to be stopped, batch dumped and machines cleaned.
The actual pre-processing sorting is quite fascinating, using spectrometers to detect the type of materials.
And while I sympathise, consider that this is part of packaging for a computer, where the manufacture of the computer itself will consume many times as many resources, and the power to use the computer over its lifetime will consume many times as many resources. With respect to the overall environmental impact of the purchase of that device, the inclusion of a device like that will be a rounding error.