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Band 2 was a phenomenal piece of software contained in an atrocious piece of hardware, as evidenced by all the people whose Bands broke at the bracelet. I thoug

by RPLong 8y ago

Band 2 was a phenomenal piece of software contained in an atrocious piece of hardware, as evidenced by all the people whose Bands broke at the bracelet. I thought it was a tragedy. Band 2 was my favorite smart watch by a country mile, when mine still worked. It left all other products in the dust. It's a shame the bracelet was so poorly designed. The thing was damn near perfect.

com2kid 8y ago
It was amazing that hardware even existed, it was a miracle of EE and ME work to get anything out the door in the time frames we had to work with. How the entire project fell apart is one of those "If you're in my neck of the woods buy me a beer" stories. Thanks for the complement on the software. :) Having a chance to help design and build an (RT)OS at that young age and then have Microsoft of all companies, ship it out was an incredible experience. The underlying RTOS has some really cool and innovative concepts in it, and it was the best environment I've ever programmed for. I might be biased about the programming environment, since I was designed or helped design most of the foundational APIs. :-D as a tl;dr, 256KB of RAM, complete async runtime, CPU was off most of the time as the DMA (direct memory access) engine did the majority of the work copying data around. The closest modern analog would be programming in nodeJS, which funny enough is exactly what I'm doing right now!
- bane 8y ago
  > 256KB of RAM, complete async runtime, CPU was off most of the time as the DMA (direct memory access) engine did the majority of the work copying data around honestly? That's pretty badass. I really liked the band concept and how it tried to actually advance wearables instead of smush watch and phone together.
  - com2kid 8y ago
    There was also some super slow external RAM off to the side that was used as a cache for static assets. Other things Band did: 1. Real true type fonts. 2. East Asia Language support 3. Real Unicode (see 1 & 2) 4. Antialiased fonts 5. Real transparency/alpha blending 6. Particle effects engine 30 FPS on a 96Mhz CPU and a dumb framebuffer. Writing a custom OS lets you do amazing things with minimal resources!

by RPLong 8y ago

com2kid 8y ago

It was amazing that hardware even existed, it was a miracle of EE and ME work to get anything out the door in the time frames we had to work with. How the entire project fell apart is one of those "If you're in my neck of the woods buy me a beer" stories. Thanks for the complement on the software. :) Having a chance to help design and build an (RT)OS at that young age and then have Microsoft of all companies, ship it out was an incredible experience. The underlying RTOS has some really cool and innovative concepts in it, and it was the best environment I've ever programmed for. I might be biased about the programming environment, since I was designed or helped design most of the foundational APIs. :-D as a tl;dr, 256KB of RAM, complete async runtime, CPU was off most of the time as the DMA (direct memory access) engine did the majority of the work copying data around. The closest modern analog would be programming in nodeJS, which funny enough is exactly what I'm doing right now!

bane 8y ago
> 256KB of RAM, complete async runtime, CPU was off most of the time as the DMA (direct memory access) engine did the majority of the work copying data around honestly? That's pretty badass. I really liked the band concept and how it tried to actually advance wearables instead of smush watch and phone together.
- com2kid 8y ago
  There was also some super slow external RAM off to the side that was used as a cache for static assets. Other things Band did: 1. Real true type fonts. 2. East Asia Language support 3. Real Unicode (see 1 & 2) 4. Antialiased fonts 5. Real transparency/alpha blending 6. Particle effects engine 30 FPS on a 96Mhz CPU and a dumb framebuffer. Writing a custom OS lets you do amazing things with minimal resources!