[Poking Technology] doesn’t think much of his new smartwatch. It is, by his admission, the cheapest possible smartwatch, coming in at about $3. It has very few useful features but he has figured out how to port MicroPython to it, so for a wrist-mounted development board with BLE, it might be useful. You can check it out in the video below.

The first step is a teardown, which reveals surprisingly little on the inside. There’s a tiny battery, a few connections, a display, and a tiny CPU board. There are, luckily, a few test pads that let you get into the CPU. What do you get? A 24 MHz Telink CPU with 512k of flash and 16k of RAM, along with all the other hardware.

Of course, even if you just want a display with some smarts, $3 might be in your price range. The whole thing wound up taped down to a PCB. But the usual debugger didn’t want to connect. Grabbing an oscilloscope revealed that the output from the board had some level problems. He eventually wrote his own debugger interface using a Pi Pico.

He was able to find the onboard CPU’s development tools. The CPU claims to be proprietary but looks suspiciously like a slightly modified ARM. A short investigation shows that the object code is extremely similar to the ARM Thumb instruction set but with a few extra bits set and different mnemonics. But once you put Python on board, who really cares?

The only downside is that it doesn’t appear that the BLE is practically usable because of memory limitations. But there are still places you might use the little watch in a project.

If you want a smartwatch, maybe build your own. While many DIY watches are simple, you can get pretty complicated if you like.

For old-timers, CRTs — cathode ray tubes — were fixtures as kids sat in front of TVs watching everything from Howdy Doody to Star Trek. But there’s at least one generation that thinks TVs and computer monitors are flat. If that describes you, you might enjoy [The 8-Bit Guy’s] coverage of how CRTs work in the video below.

CRTs were heavy, took high voltage, and had a dangerous vacuum inside, so we really don’t miss them. The phosphor on the screen had a tendency to “burn in” if you showed the same image over and over. We don’t miss that either.

The basic idea is simple. An electron is fired at the phosphor behind the screen. An electrostatic or electromagnetic arrangement allows you to hit specific spots on the screen, and, of course, you can turn the beam off. Color CRTs have three different phosphors, and the beams have to fire at the correct color phosphor.

The best part of the video is the part where they tear apart an actual CRT, something you don’t see very often. We were worried about the vacuum, but the tube in question had already vented to atmosphere.

We doubt CRTs will make a comeback like vinyl records have. If so, maybe you’ll settle for a software simulation. It does make retrocomputing simulators feel better.

Attention, slackers — if you do remote work for a financial institution, using a mouse jiggler might not be the best career move. That’s what a dozen people learned this week as they became former employees of Wells Fargo after allegedly being caught “simulating keyboard activity” while working remotely. Having now spent more than twice as many years working either hybrid or fully remote, we get it; sometimes, you’ve just got to step away from the keyboard for a bit. But we’ve never once felt the need to create the “impression of active work” during those absences. Perhaps that’s because we’ve never worked in a regulated environment like financial services.

For our part, we’re curious as to how the bank detected the use of a jiggler. The linked article mentions that regulators recently tightened rules that require employers to treat an employee’s home as a “non-branch location” subject to periodic inspection. More than enough reason to quit, in our opinion, but perhaps they sent someone snooping? More likely, the activity simulators were discovered by technical means. The article contains a helpful tip to avoid powering a jiggler from the computer’s USB, which implies detecting the device over the port. Our guess is that Wells tracks mouse and keyboard activity and compares it against a machine-learning model to look for signs of slacking.

Speaking of the intersection of soulless corporate giants and AI, what’s this world coming to when AI walks you right into an online scam? That’s what happened to a Canadian man recently when he tried to get help moving Facebook to his new phone. He searched for a customer service number for Facebook and found one listed, but thought it would be wise to verify the number. So he pulled up the “Meta AI”-powered search tool in Facebook Messenger and asked if the number was legit. “No problem,” came the reply, so he called the number and promptly got attacked by the scammers on the other end, who within minutes used his PayPal account to buy $500 worth of Apple gift cards. From the sound of it, the guy did everything he should have to protect himself, at least up to a point. But when a company’s chatbot system gives you bad information about their own customer support, things like this are going to happen.

Just a reminder that we’re deep into con season now. Open Sauce should be just about wrapped up by the time this gets published, and coming up the week after is Teardown 2024 in Portland. The schedule for that has been released, which includes a workshop on retrocomputing with the “Voja4” Supercon badge. A little further on into the summer and back on the East Coast will be HOPE XV, which still has some tickets left. The list of speakers for that one looks pretty good, as does the workshop roundup.

And finally, if you have some STL models in need of a little creative mutilation, try out this STL twister online tool. It’s by our friend [Andrew Sink], who has come up with a couple of other interesting 3D tools, like the Banana for Scale tool and the 3D Low-Poly Generator. The STL Twister does pretty much what it says and puts the screws to whatever STL model you drop on it. The MakerBot Gnome mascot that pops up by default is a particularly good model for screwifying. Enjoy!

[Thomas] found an interesting probable millivoltmeter with some Beckman displays. Like many instruments from that time period, this one had a lot of tobacco smoke residue inside. The display unit inside had a sticker that not only showed the company that made it, but also had their Telex number on it, another sign of the times. You can see the device in the video below.

The unit looked like a one-off made by a hobbyist or a technician but the case looked suspiciously like old Bang and Olfusen equipment. Someone in the video comments mentions it was built for the service department.

Some of the wiring had not survived well and there was a broken display digit. What’s more, is the millivolt marking applied to the display. The actual instrument has dividers that provide readings in volts, not millivolts.

That Beckman display is very retro and [Thomas] breaks into that subassembly if you fancy a peek inside. Beckman made some interesting displays. Voltmeters sure have changed over the years.

The Surface Arc is a designed-for-travel mouse that carries flat, but curves into shape for use. It even turns on when it’s bent and shuts itself off when it’s flat. The device isn’t particularly new, but [Mr Teardown] was a bit surprised at the lack of details about what’s inside so tears it down in a video to reveal just how the mechanism works.

The snap-action of the bending is accomplished with the help of a magnetic connection near the bottom end of the mouse’s “tail”, locking it into place when flexed. Interestingly, the on and off functionality does not involve magnets at all. Power control is accomplished by a little tab that physically actuates a microswitch.

There are a few interesting design bits that we weren’t expecting. For example, there is no mechanical scroll wheel. The mouse delivers similar functionality with touch sensors and a haptic feedback motor to simulate the feel and operation of a mechanical scroll wheel.

[Mr Teardown] finds the design elegant and effective, but we can’t help but notice it also seems perhaps not as optimized as it could be. There are over 70 components in all, including 23 screws (eight different kinds!), and it took [Mr Teardown] the better part of 45 minutes to re-assemble it. You can watch the entire teardown in the video embedded just under the page break; it’s a neat piece of hardware for sure.

If you’re in the mood for another mouse teardown, we have a treat for you: an ancient optical mouse from the 80s that required a special surface to work.

[via Core77]

You know how the saying goes — they don’t make them like this anymore. It’s arguably true of pretty much any electronic device given the way technology changes over time, though whether or not it’s objectively a bad thing is going to vary from case to case.

As a practical example, take a look at the insides of this 80’s vintage HP 3314A function generator shared on the EEV Blog Forum by [D Straney].

With multiple PCBs stacked on top of each other, it’s hard to imagine that more components could possibly be crammed into it. One board in particular appears to be an entire Motorola 6800 computer, something which today would likely be replaced with a single microcontroller.

Which is actually why [D Straney] shared this with us in the first place. After seeing our recent post about a modern waveform generator that’s basically an empty box thanks to its modern components, they thought this would be a nice example of the opposite extreme.

So, is it a good or a bad thing that test equipment isn’t made this way anymore? Well, it’s hard to argue with the improved capabilities, smaller footprint, and reduced cost of most modern gear. But damn is the inside of this HP 3314A gorgeous. As one of the commenters on the page put it, hardware from this era was really a work of art.