JustEnoughDucks

You said it right there in your comment.

Sleep mode, (and other effectively off modes) where it is functionally useless, it can do.

MSP430 can do 140uA/MHz. That is ~7 times the power that this application supplies, and that is not counting any single other chip quiescent current or chip that actively provides useful data. You would have to have a battery anyway or a big cap to provide the needed current for on-states. Or you could run it extremely low frequencies like you said, but those tend to not scale linearly at all with per MHz power ratings. Quiescent currents tend to catch up fast at that scale. I would be extremely doubtful that 150kHz would scale perfectly and wouldn't have already exponentially decayed to around its lowest possible on-state consumption for the chip. I would definitely have to see tests on that.

The smallest of batteries like the VARTA tiny cells in TWS's are infinitely more useful and practical and it would take this application months to fill a single cell, discounting all losses.

It is the Mac of network hardware in my corporate - entered experience.

It is aesthetic hardware, marketing, and everything software related looks polished on the surface, but is buggy (particularly their access which is the worst thing to be buggy) with the least possible configurability, completely obscured debugging resources, and proprietary ways to make you reliant on their support services.

That being said, I am still using them because I got a 30€ UAP-AC-SHD from my company's old stock when we switched to Cisco hardware. And their cloud gateway ultra is a good value. My whole house setup with prosumer hardware will be 140€ and where my internet comes in is the worst place in the house to put a wireless router.

I don't think people realize how extremely little 50uW is.

For a standard 3.3V microcontroller assuming a 95% efficient voltage regulator will be a current of 14.4uA. Just having the HSI master clock enabled on one of the low power STML0 chips is 15uA. This will literally only the clock. That is 0 sensors, 0 communication, 0 IO, nothing useful at all. For reference, reading SPO2 with a very efficient maxm86161 takes 10uA by itself in ultra low power mode with low accuracy and not counting the max leakage current of 1uA. For full operation, you need about 1000x-10000x that amount for short bursts.

"Oh but it can cHaRgE tHe BaTtErY"

Let's say the device has a standard 100mAh battery (apple watch had a 228mAh or more). At 100% efficiency with absolutely not one millijoule being used by any other electronics (which would never ever happen, it would at the very least need a boost converter), it would take around 277 days to charge up that tiny tiny battery.

Let's take another example of an even smaller battery. To charge one side of the airpods 3rd gen (0.133Wh battery), it would take 110 days per ear

This is one of those free "energy harvesting" fad BS based in nothing but wishing and marketing. It is an interesting learning project for wireless antenna beginners, but that is the extent.

With electronics, that is only the tip of the iceburg before you get into trinocular microscopes which the absolute cheapest are almost 300€ nowadays 😉 then assembled PCB prototypes where every iteration can be 200-500€ depending on size. Or you could get into spending hundreds on hotplates and reflow ovens to do it yourself.

But wouldn't it be faster and cheaper in the long run to be able to fabricate the simple PCBs yourself? There goes 1000€ on a small CNC 😂 rabbit hole goes deeeeep.

Electronics projects mostly.

Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:

• esp32-C3 dumb doorbell (just a doorbell that sends an MQTT message and sleeps the rest of the time). It works fatastic except that my Proximus ISP modem/router completely fucked up and so the network is no longer usable and I had to set it in bridge mode to a router it can't reach. I want to release it, but haven't had the time to water - resistance test it or make assembly instructions
• esp32-S3 voice assistant satellite attached to an IR blaster, I2S mic, and PCM5102 to control and send audio to my old Yamaha RX-496RDS to control it via IR and can play audio (local or Spotify) via music assistant. Pretty much an Alexa echo attached to my speaker system. PCB link which I am planning on releasing.
• My unfinished Flight Stick with custom electronics, fully custom 3D printable housing, etc... It is almost done, but needs like 2 more small iterations, but we moved and started doing a full-strip renovation, so my 3D printer is no longer set up because it is too dusty inside, and I don't want to spend another $100 doing a PCB test iteration to use a better ADC with less components. Eventually as firmware practice, I want to rewrite the firmware in Rust or something. I also just looked at the Repo and the quick logo I drew up has been modified somehow without any commit. I know for a fact it was correct before. Very weird.

I also have tons of new project ideas that I don't have time for.

My other hobbies

• weightlifting, again completely dropped off due to every free moment renovating

• Running a home server with replacement services for everything I need

• Running (my motivation has been 0 recently...)

• cooking. I try to do a few new recipes per month

• gardening. With the renovation, I just grew a few courgettes, tomatoes, and squash this year

• video games (more of a de-stresser nowadays than a hobby, most recently casual rocket league with friends is fun, hadn't played since 2018 or so)

This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.

That being said, I am happy about it. I got my company to use it and finally got my girlfriend to use it and just recommended it to her brother. Would hate to have to try to find something else

Really? My girlfriend's A52 doesn't have this feature. That is part of why I bought my Xperia 5ii. Is it a new feature?

(After 3 years the battery is at 70% on mine because apparently Sony uses shitty as hell batteries and software drain glitches, while my girlfriend's A52 always charging to 100% lasts a day and a half with 3x the use, would not recommend)

That is a different usecase though. That is simply syncing local musical with a server.

I do that too because i have an SD card. Just use Syncthing for that. Much faster and less hassle. You can use any music player on your phone that you want, not just one that works with jellyfin.

If you aren't streaming music in real time for the majority of time, then do a phone sync, not a streaming server.

I have heard symphonium is very good if they are looking at closed source Plex anyway. It works with jellyfin and navidrome.

I just use syncthing to sync all of my music to my phone's SD card. Then PowerAmp since there aren't many fully featured foss music players. I am keeping my eye on Auxio though, keeping it installed and updated.

It's interesting the difference in what people think a collapsed civilization will look like.

Some people think we will "return to monke" where wilderness survival skills will be essential and people who have them will be the "main characters." That would probably be the easier and better future.

The more likely option will be technofeudalism where rich people have small, brutal armies and control localized power grids, farming operations, and politics with tech as mass migrations happen and wildlife becomes all but extinct outside of human cultivation. Survival skills won't matter when all land and food scarcity is controlled by a rich few with absolute control. The average survivalist will be wiped out with the first natural disaster or by the feudal lords with drones. Return to nature might only come after 50 years when chip supplies and power grids have dried up and fallen apart, but it would just as likely be mad-max as oil could likely still be used.

Who knows. Fascism might take over with how it is going now and solve the climate crisis with mass genocide and forcing green energy for all we know.

The thing about meshtastic is the walking distance range and limitation to text messages.

Though I don't know if it is possible to integrate a LoRAWAN concentrator with a nice collinear J-pole antenna to mount on the top of your house to move to a double digit range where it could be useful as a neighborhood mesh with multiple channels. (With the added benefit of using lorawan devices like pet trackers and things).

Still Lora smart (but local) home agriculture, water collection, etc... Is a really cool technology for large properties.

And ladies and gentlemen, that is part of the reason for the gender gap lol