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 _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list Hardwarehacking@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking