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There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit

237 points by ir193 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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no_time 5y ago
I don't get the worry about it being hackable. Sure, you could engineer the whole thing with crypto in mind from top to bottom. With trustzone on the chip and safetynet on the phons but what's that gonna achieve? The test is not done in a controlled enviroment anyways. People looking to cheat the system could simply get their friends to do their "hackproof" tests.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Foone has specifically asked that their tweets not be submitted here.
bombcar 5y ago
Excellent. Just what the Dr ordered.
Uptrenda 5y ago
I worked at a company that was using these chips to control doors. They're extremely cheap chips, but writing code for them is not pleasant. Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Props to the devs who helped put this together.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  At that point, why not just use something like the original SoC from the Raspberry Pi 1 and use the plethora of Linux dev tools available?
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Cost, power, board complexity, reliability. Embedded development is much different than what a lot of developers are used to.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      Also availability. The more basic the chip, the easier / faster it is to get 1k of them. (or to find a perfect/close match requiring minimal changes)
      - varjag 5y ago
        That's only a recent thing really.
        viraptor 5y ago
        It's a recent thing on a world scale. But it's always been an issue and applies to anything you buy - the more sophisticated, the fewer items are stocked in warehouses. It's not that they wouldn't be available, it's that once you start ordering hundreds, the lead time will change from days to weeks at some point.
        varjag 5y ago
        Hundreds is really a loose retail quantity if we talk about microcontrollers, the first real price break point is typically 1000pcs. Smaller quantities are cut and priced by distributors themselves. In normal times, most products not marked as EOL would be available in tens of thousands with short lead times.
        colechristensen 5y ago
        No, short term and long term availability of a part in volume has always been a part of circuit design. The current situation has been a unique extreme of this, but buying a million count of an electronic part hasn’t ever been an arbitrary off the shelf affair. How many a distributor has for immediate shipping, the lead time for large quantities, and the end of life plans were always a consideration. Before though the problems you were trying to avoid were more like not delaying production for six weeks because a part was out of stock or whether you could keep building this board for the next ten years.
  - Renaud 5y ago
    Really not the same beasts. The Cortex M4 microcontroller is self-contained with every peripheral it needs (including BT and wireless stack) and its power consumption is very small compared to a SoC. Also, it's not booting Linux at all. For these simplish one-purpose applications, you don't want the overhead and it probably would need more than the 24k or RAM onboard the nRF52810. They could be using Zephyr though as it supports the Cortex M4 (it's a linux-like RTOS that can be heavily customised).
  - numpad0 5y ago
    Nordic nRF5x chips has community Arduino support(which is very nice to me!) if that's what you want.
- wcunning 5y ago
  Any chance I can reuse one of these boards given that I have a few of these test kits? Or are the tools so bad that it's not worth it?
  - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
    An nRF52 dev kit is like $30. It’s probably not worth the time and aggravation to try to repurpose one of these COVID tests unless you’re really determined. Nordic is one of the better vendors - their tools and docs aren’t too bad.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      You also do not have to use their tools. Use Rust with nrf-rs, or Apache Mynewt (with a fully open source BLE stack), or libopencm3, or…
- bsder 5y ago
  > Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Okay, I'm going to ask "Compared to whom?" Nordic has been one of the better BLE chip manufacturers in terms of documentation, in my experience. Most places use Keil tools directly from ARM. So, if programming these sucks, so does programming most embedded Cortex M4 chips. (No argument. Keil sucks. However, that doesn't mean that Nordic sucks any worse than anybody else). And now you can program Nordic chips using Visual Studio Code.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    Say what you will about the hardware, but ESP-IDF is the gold standard for me now
    - floatboth 5y ago
      ehh… It is pretty easy to use but there's way too much bundled stuff in there, you're always under FreeRTOS, and Wi-Fi support is all proprietary blobs (but that's unfortunately the case with every embedded Wi-Fi chip… unlike Bluetooth LE with has multiple fully FOSS implementations)
      - BoorishBears 5y ago
        I don't know what you mean by "way too much stuff", it's mostly use what you want. It's easy enough to disable any features you don't want with their sdk config stuff They used to even ship a "No OS" SDK for the 8266, but the demand just wasn't there, FreeRTOS is pretty solid for the core competency of their product after all...
  - hemogloben 5y ago
    Sure, comparing BLE specifically. And Nordics chip / peripheral level documentation is fine, but their software stack documentation (at least as of 3 years ago when I was last working on BLE stuff) is fine at best. They released a new version of the API every 6-12 months with lots of backwards incompatible changes (a new major version every time...), referenced examples from previous API versions (but didn't port them to the new version), and added tons of new poorly documented compile-time config options to every API version. All told I figured out how to make a reasonably complex chain of bluetooth devices work (largely by reading the source and comparing against old version API documentation to figure out differences), so it definitely could have been worse. But to imply that just because the documentation is BETTER than the competition that it is GOOD? No. Its fine.
- jkelleyrtp 5y ago
  In contrast, embedded Rust is quite a pleasant experience on the nrf line, including the 52xx series.
- rurban 5y ago
  I write baremetal fw for those chips. No debugger, extremely bad stdlib which I rewrote, no qemu. Horrible modem interface. But still much more pleasent than Linux FW or raspi's. They are cheap, last 10 years with a single battery, and do only what they need to do. Also secure. No crazy attack vectors. And easily symbolically verifiable. And I wrote tons of simulators and fuzzers for them.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Let me flip this around, I am looking for ways to improve testing, specially now that I am mostly remote. In your experience, what targets have a stress-free experience with qemu emulation?
    - rurban 5y ago
      Working on it in my github rurban/qemu-stm32 fork. Checkout supported platforms for qemu and better renode. There you also have debugging interfaces. Stressfree qemu support was only for my even smaller avr targets, the 1281. But AVR is crazy compared to the Cortex-M4. We switched to arm completely, no avr's anymore. Anyway, no need for qemu or other emulators, when you can easily write simulators. You just throw in some mmaps, the simulated libc, the UART, and networking. Much better than emulators.
      - patricktlo 5y ago
        Your simulations sound super interesting, I'd love to read more if you're willing to write about it!
        jononor 5y ago
        Not the parent, but I wrote a little bit about this here: https://www.jonnor.com/2017/03/host-based-simulation-for-embedded-systems/ https://www.jonnor.com/2017/03/host-based-simulation-for-emb... The key thing is to make the majority of the code portable enough to run on a PC. I find the best way to do that is to keep things data-oriented, using Plain Old Data type data structures and pure functions as much as possible. Alternative view: isolate out any device-specific pieces, like I/O into as small and simple pieces as possible. When one takes this mindset one realizes that even things that are considered as "device specific", like device drivers usually have a lot of logic that can actually be separate from the I/O. And by having a swappable I/O backend (say for I2C) one can actually test the vast majority of this logic on a computer. One should also have an implementation of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that is "host", allowing to run on a PC, potentially with virtual inputs and outputs. This allows to run essentially all of the firmware on a PC. If one uses a embedded-friendly test framework, like Unity, then one can also run the same tests that is used on the PC on the device - to make sure that there is no difference when ran on host vs device. Unfortunately, the code from embedded device vendors is rarely amenable to this, so that code can end up as "untestable" under this scheme. For them portability" is only considered between their own hardware devices, not to a computer. Then one has to trust that they have done their own QA. Which is usually not that great - looking at you ST HAL....
- floatboth 5y ago
  nRF52s are definitely not extremely cheap, they're high-quality fully-documented dev-friendly chips with lots of onboard resources. If you want cheapest BLE, there's some utter crap from Dialog Semiconductor that comes with a proprietary SDK in ROM and one-time programmable (!!) memory for the application (external flash can be used in development). And you DO NOT have to use the Nordic SDK, there are lots of better and fully FOSS options — Apache Mynewt, libopencm3, Rust nrf-rs…
heavyset_go 5y ago
This is cool, and I enjoy foone's tweets about hacking around on embedded electronics you can buy at your local pharmacy. I just hope the unscrupulous don't have a field day with the potential spin this story and headline can have.
bobsmooth 5y ago
The chip is $4. The test is much more expensive than that.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  And it’s about half price @ 1000 units.
- 55873445216111 5y ago
  The Digi-Key price is $4. The direct price when buying millions of units will be a fraction of the Digi-Key price.
- gst 5y ago
  The expensive price of the tests is actually a whole different problem. For the last tests that I bought at Walgreens (InteliSwab) I paid around $25 for two tests. Meanwhile I'm currently in Europe and as a consumer I can buy Antigen tests for around 3 Euro per test (would be less than 2 Euro if bought in bulk). As far as I know those prices are not subsidized.
  - cdtwigg 5y ago
    Propublica has been covering this, the FDA has been throwing up barriers to rapid tests while Europe has been embracing them. One of the barriers is that "users are supposed to be able to execute the test without training " which I suspect is what's leading to the inclusion of optical sensors etc. https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-rapid-test-just-weeks-into-the-pandemic-heres-why-you-still-cant-get-it https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-...
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      Which is pretty much an impossible goal - the user still needs to be able to follow quite detailed instructions to get the sample, correctly mix in the buffer solution, and dose the correct number of drips. Sure, thats something 99% of people can do, but then 99% of people can see 1 or 2 lines on the test without the help of an app...
exmadscientist 5y ago
Nordic is not really that cheap if you just want a Cortex-M4. You buy Nordic parts for their radios. If you just want processing power, GigaDevices has an M4 at less than $1 last I checked. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work for the design we were working on as the standby power consumption wasn't great.
- monocasa 5y ago
  I don't think they wanted an M4 per se, but instead wanted a bluetooth radio to save on the cost of a screen. The Nordic chip just happens to be based around an M4.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    IIRC Nordic has a M0 version with bluetooth radio--the BBC micro:bit and a few other maker boards used it. But perhaps it's not really available in cheap quantities anymore and a way overpowered M4 is what they got.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      Yeah, those are the nrf51x line, this is the nrf52x line. It seems from the outside at least that Nordic is pushing the nrf52x hard even in price conscious designs. Even the micro::bit was respun for a v2 with a nrf52x also (including it's M4). Albeit I don't have much direct data on that.
      - floatboth 5y ago
        Yes, the 51 is really old by now. The 52 line extends down as far as the tiny nRF52805. The 51822 is not nearly as fun to work with as the 52s, e.g. current Apache Mynewt with NimBLE doesn't even fit into the 51's tiny flash, the 51 doesn't have systick, and so on.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  If you want bargain basement processors with connectivity, Qualcomm is still selling many of the old CSR chips. The low end chips went for <$0.50 in volume and the power consumption was often barely worth measuring. We used to chuck them into products every time every time I lost an argument with the hardware team about whether 10-15 cents of BOM cost is worth 3 months of painful bringup.
abeyer 5y ago
So how long before someone starts buying up covid tests to strip these out again and resell to the supply chain challenged?
- ekianjo 5y ago
  The tests are not cheap
- paxys 5y ago
  Buy a $40 test to resell a $2 chip. Genius.
  - mrunkel 5y ago
    They’ll make up for it in volume!
ctdonath 5y ago
.
- sodality2 5y ago
  wrong thread methinks
  - bener 5y ago
    It's a post from the same Twitter user that posted this teardown.
c-smile 5y ago
Do we have Doom running on it?
- ekianjo 5y ago
  as mentioned in the thread it would need more RAM to do so
- programmarchy 5y ago
  Depends if the test comes out positive or negative.
fnord77 5y ago
funny there's a chip shortage for certain chips. yet here are disposable chips...
ip26 5y ago
This is depressing. Single use disposable. Full of copper, gold, tungsten, halfnium. Will leach poison into the ground. Some of the most advanced technology of our age. Use it once, toss it in the trash. Meanwhile the paper versions work just fine.
- deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- aeternum 5y ago
  We've made significant advancements in catalytic converters over the last decade and many waste management centers are able to incinerate much of the trash without the toxic emissions. They can then use magnets and eddy current separators to extract nearly all the metals out of the resulting ash.
  - jraph 5y ago
    This is new to me. But even if it's true, it still requires a lot of energy to produce the chip and then apply the waste management you mention. The best waste is the one that does not exist.
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  The optics on this seem to indicate that it is just a lateral flow test of some kind. It's not even different. Instead of having to interpret a couple lines you have software interpret the strip and tell you over bt on your phone. So much tech for so little.
  - new299 5y ago
    In the Lucira test is a bit more justifiable it's a full molecular test, with built in controls, better accuracy than lateral flow. The optics is pretty neat too: https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid
ir193 5y ago
edit: was wrong about the test price. It should be $38.99 / ea test.
wcunning 5y ago
So my followup question is: I have a few of these, can I do anything with them once I'm done with the test? Hook up to the headers and reprogram? What about the Binax test? Or any of the other "connected" ones?
- wcunning 5y ago
  Answering my own question: he gets there much later in the thread -- looks like single wired debug is available at a pad on the board. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1475268224635662336 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1475268224635662336
- stbtrax 5y ago
  probably not worth your time unless you're looking for an art project. you can get a devkit for dollars that has pins brought out and more flash and ram https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001593980172.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001593980172.html
- numpad0 5y ago
  Basically all those nRF5x products are Arduino compatible AirTags with a battery included. IIRC they also have an imprecise but low power, chip integral temperature gauge. Maybe a wireless interval thermometer might be a good start?
  - antoniuschan99 5y ago
    Yea I saw somewhere airtags are just Nordic chips? Kind of surprised because the airpod w1/h1 chips aren’t
    - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
      I would guess either better margins or better low power performance for better battery longevity in the nRF 52.
- theta_d 5y ago
  Binax is just some cardboard and a strip, no chips.
joe1138 5y ago
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
wcunning 5y ago
Note: Hackaday discussion available at https://hackaday.com/2021/10/17/electronic-covid-test-tear-down-shows-frustrating-example-of-1-time-use-waste/ https://hackaday.com/2021/10/17/electronic-covid-test-tear-d...
joezydeco 5y ago
Having worked on automated ELISA equipment decades ago, it's kind of interesting to see this come full circle. The earliest machines used a light source and color filter to try and get the signal from the finished enzyme sandwich. Then lateral-flow came along and it was up to a human to make the observation. Now we're back to the computer doing it again.
iszomer 5y ago
I would have understood an IoT widget for the purpose of contact tracing but for this instead? ...
qbasic_forever 5y ago
FYI some of those Ellume brand tests were recalled: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/ellume-recalls-covid-19-home-test-potential-false-positive-sars-cov-2-test-results https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e...
new299 5y ago
The Lucira test is in my opinion a bit more interesting: https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid They include an STM32, but the instrument is performing an Isothermal PCR molecular test which makes the inclusion of a microcontroller a requirement. Obviously throwing out electronics like this seems quite wasteful. But overall our society is fairly wasteful when it comes to disposable electronics.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  The Cue testing devices are interesting. The Bluetooth, battery, and most of the interesting bits are all in a reusable device with a slot for single-use cartridges. The cartridges are fairly dumb (other than the chemical stuff I think there's just an i2c chip)
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Wow, that is wonderfully complex! I do wish that there was an established recycling pipeline available for them though.
- amelius 5y ago
  > They include an STM32 This might explain partly why they are all sold out :(
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Hey man, cut me deep here. I need STM to get their stuff together and ship product. The next batch of product I ship is already at a loss because I’m buying from scalpers :( I’m just lucky we’re a non-electronics business that shipes electronics parts. If we were an electronics company, I would seriously consider a year hiatus, or switch to software contracting for awhile.
evan_ 5y ago
I wonder why they didn’t use NFC. They could get away with a much simpler chip, or even a fully analog solution if they didn’t need the complexity of Bluetooth. Seems like you could just about accomplish the same thing with a pair of NFC tokens, a photodiode, and some transistors. Basic components. Connect one of the two NFC chips to the coil depending on how much light is reflected off the test strip. When you scanned it with your phone the activated NFC chip would respond with a URL containing a unique ID which could be interpreted by the manufacturer.
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  Or if they are already using Nordic chips, slightly more expensive nRF52832 can also do NFC.
- sofixa 5y ago
  One reason i can think is that NFC wasn't ubiquitous on non-premium phones a few years ago, unlike Bluetooth.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    It still isn't ubiquitous. For example, the Moto G line of cheap Androids are popular, and most have no NFC.
- tjoff 5y ago
  Because of apple.
  - tjoff 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bushbaba 5y ago
  iPhones only relatively recently started supporting nfc for non payment use cases. https://blog.nordicsemi.com/getconnected/native-nfc-support-in-new-iphone https://blog.nordicsemi.com/getconnected/native-nfc-support-...
deleted 5y ago
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sydthrowaway 5y ago
Why don’t we have biodegradable chips?
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  Because we don't tax cheap non-biodegradable things and don't really care about dismissal. We could subsidize research into biodegradables, though ...
roeles 5y ago
For those interested: I ported FreeRTOS 9 to an nRF52840 in my previous job. This family used a lot. It's in my Tado smart radiator knobs, in the AirTags. I can only compare it to FreeScale chips, but one thing that pleasantly surprised me is the flexibility in pin-assignment. Instead of the pin-mux that we'd have to do on the MK24, I could just assign pins during usb/i2c init without any limitations. The SDK is quite elaborate, although sometimes a bit difficult to use in C++.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  An any-to-any IO multiplexer turns out to be pretty large in silicon area. You're paying extra for that feature as opposed to devices where each pin has a choice of just say 3 functions. For most users, they prefer to have the chips cheaper and spend an extra few minutes of engineer time figuring out which pins need to be hooked up to what. I can see for smaller volume devices where engineer time dominates, and devices that you want to be really field reconfigurable, the all-to-all mux is worth it though.
  - roeles 5y ago
    Thanks for the insight! I didn't choose the nRF, it was a given. I believe it was chosen due to being similar to the MK24 (also an M4) and having Bluetooth. The chips ended going into wearables, and BTLE was seen as the way to configure/upgrade the devices.
dmix 5y ago
US paid $230M to have this device built. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/02/01/us-231m-deal-ellume-at-home-covid-19-test.html https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/02/01/us-231m-deal-ellume-at...
- kristopolous 5y ago
  I can't help but imagine a parking lot full of Ferraris at their offices Maybe I'm Elizabeth Holmsing it, but I'm thinking it could have been done for 1/50th that price while still paying people well and providing them the resources they need. Am I missing something?
  - lanternfish 5y ago
    Money is remarkably adept at reducing red tape to ribbons. I think this is a timeframe/certainty axis more than an efficacy/cost one.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    This goes into a bit more detail. https://www.mcknightshomecare.com/ellume-receives-230m-government-contract-to-ramp-up-production-of-at-home-covid-19-test/ https://www.mcknightshomecare.com/ellume-receives-230m-gover...
- tssva 5y ago
  They paid $230 million for 8.1 million devices and the building of a US based manufacturing facility capable of producing 19 million devices a month.
AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
As a European: why are there chips in this? I just broke open mine and it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/muz7FIy https://imgur.com/a/muz7FIy I bought 50 of these 2 weeks ago. Were 3-4 euro a piece.
- mrunkel 5y ago
  It’s for the Bluetooth piece. The optical sensor reads the result and the turns on the light and/or lets the phone know over Bluetooth. Seems unnecessary, but if people want to buy it…
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    > Seems unnecessary, but if people want to buy it… Considering that this is an article used once for a few minutes the environmental cost for production and deposition is high and society shouldn't tolerate ...
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Once for this specific test. If you planned on buying a lot of tests and using them regularly, maybe you could find value in a BLE connection? IDK. That crosses into a different new normal line for me that I am uninterested in I think. Otherwise, I agree, seems wasteful when you look at what had to happen to ship that product.
      - johannes1234321 5y ago
        If you do mass testing the Bluetooth might be useful in theory, but you babe to make sure to protect the data well ...
    - pixl97 5y ago
      The environmental cost of getting more people sick with covid is also high.
      - 5y ago
infologics 5y ago
[dead]
Havoc 5y ago
Seems like unnecessary e-waste to me.
Fnoord 5y ago
Also see this previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29637592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29637592 (Faking a Positive Covid Test (f-secure.com))
daneel_w 5y ago
I can't believe even a fractional percentage of customers would find it useful to have wireless interaction with a disposable single-use test kit, compared to reading the result off of a passive testing strip. It would've been reedemable if they had sold the strips as a separate replacable product so that the electronic device could be fully utilized.
- belter 5y ago
  It might have its uses...If for privacy reasons, the testing subject is in a closed room and you want to make sure they report from the correct test.
  - daneel_w 5y ago
    What if the patient doesn't have a smartphone (or don't know how to pair/operate Bluetooth), or too many active test kits are lingering in the patient waiting room making it impossible to navigate all the devices? I don't see how this particular SKU would be a good fit for a clinic. Easier and cheaper to just give the patient a passive test strip they can use in their own privacy.
    - belter 5y ago
      The point is that the patient might have a previous one and show that one instead as negative...or lie about the result...niche scenarios, but is this not an niche use case anyway?
hansihe 5y ago
I just flew in to Minneapolis from Europe last night and they handed these out for free at the airport. Was really surprised to see the Bluetooth sign on the box.
theHIDninja 5y ago
So this is where all the chips are going during the shortage. Good to know we finally get some answers to that.
rasz 5y ago
~$30 and they werent even good "Ellume Recalls COVID-19 Home Test for Potential False Positive SARS-CoV-2 Test Results" https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/ellume-recalls-covid-19-home-test-potential-false-positive-sars-cov-2-test-results https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e...

237 points by ir193 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

I don't get the worry about it being hackable. Sure, you could engineer the whole thing with crypto in mind from top to bottom. With trustzone on the chip and safetynet on the phons but what's that gonna achieve? The test is not done in a controlled enviroment anyways. People looking to cheat the system could simply get their friends to do their "hackproof" tests.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

Foone has specifically asked that their tweets not be submitted here.

bombcar 5y ago

Excellent. Just what the Dr ordered.

Uptrenda 5y ago

I worked at a company that was using these chips to control doors. They're extremely cheap chips, but writing code for them is not pleasant. Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Props to the devs who helped put this together.

netr0ute 5y ago
At that point, why not just use something like the original SoC from the Raspberry Pi 1 and use the plethora of Linux dev tools available?
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Cost, power, board complexity, reliability. Embedded development is much different than what a lot of developers are used to.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    Also availability. The more basic the chip, the easier / faster it is to get 1k of them. (or to find a perfect/close match requiring minimal changes)
    - varjag 5y ago
      That's only a recent thing really.
      - viraptor 5y ago
        It's a recent thing on a world scale. But it's always been an issue and applies to anything you buy - the more sophisticated, the fewer items are stocked in warehouses. It's not that they wouldn't be available, it's that once you start ordering hundreds, the lead time will change from days to weeks at some point.
        varjag 5y ago
        Hundreds is really a loose retail quantity if we talk about microcontrollers, the first real price break point is typically 1000pcs. Smaller quantities are cut and priced by distributors themselves. In normal times, most products not marked as EOL would be available in tens of thousands with short lead times.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        No, short term and long term availability of a part in volume has always been a part of circuit design. The current situation has been a unique extreme of this, but buying a million count of an electronic part hasn’t ever been an arbitrary off the shelf affair. How many a distributor has for immediate shipping, the lead time for large quantities, and the end of life plans were always a consideration. Before though the problems you were trying to avoid were more like not delaying production for six weeks because a part was out of stock or whether you could keep building this board for the next ten years.
- Renaud 5y ago
  Really not the same beasts. The Cortex M4 microcontroller is self-contained with every peripheral it needs (including BT and wireless stack) and its power consumption is very small compared to a SoC. Also, it's not booting Linux at all. For these simplish one-purpose applications, you don't want the overhead and it probably would need more than the 24k or RAM onboard the nRF52810. They could be using Zephyr though as it supports the Cortex M4 (it's a linux-like RTOS that can be heavily customised).
- numpad0 5y ago
  Nordic nRF5x chips has community Arduino support(which is very nice to me!) if that's what you want.
wcunning 5y ago
Any chance I can reuse one of these boards given that I have a few of these test kits? Or are the tools so bad that it's not worth it?
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  An nRF52 dev kit is like $30. It’s probably not worth the time and aggravation to try to repurpose one of these COVID tests unless you’re really determined. Nordic is one of the better vendors - their tools and docs aren’t too bad.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    You also do not have to use their tools. Use Rust with nrf-rs, or Apache Mynewt (with a fully open source BLE stack), or libopencm3, or…
bsder 5y ago
> Documentation is lacking and the tools people use to write code for it suck. Okay, I'm going to ask "Compared to whom?" Nordic has been one of the better BLE chip manufacturers in terms of documentation, in my experience. Most places use Keil tools directly from ARM. So, if programming these sucks, so does programming most embedded Cortex M4 chips. (No argument. Keil sucks. However, that doesn't mean that Nordic sucks any worse than anybody else). And now you can program Nordic chips using Visual Studio Code.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Say what you will about the hardware, but ESP-IDF is the gold standard for me now
  - floatboth 5y ago
    ehh… It is pretty easy to use but there's way too much bundled stuff in there, you're always under FreeRTOS, and Wi-Fi support is all proprietary blobs (but that's unfortunately the case with every embedded Wi-Fi chip… unlike Bluetooth LE with has multiple fully FOSS implementations)
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      I don't know what you mean by "way too much stuff", it's mostly use what you want. It's easy enough to disable any features you don't want with their sdk config stuff They used to even ship a "No OS" SDK for the 8266, but the demand just wasn't there, FreeRTOS is pretty solid for the core competency of their product after all...
- hemogloben 5y ago
  Sure, comparing BLE specifically. And Nordics chip / peripheral level documentation is fine, but their software stack documentation (at least as of 3 years ago when I was last working on BLE stuff) is fine at best. They released a new version of the API every 6-12 months with lots of backwards incompatible changes (a new major version every time...), referenced examples from previous API versions (but didn't port them to the new version), and added tons of new poorly documented compile-time config options to every API version. All told I figured out how to make a reasonably complex chain of bluetooth devices work (largely by reading the source and comparing against old version API documentation to figure out differences), so it definitely could have been worse. But to imply that just because the documentation is BETTER than the competition that it is GOOD? No. Its fine.
jkelleyrtp 5y ago
In contrast, embedded Rust is quite a pleasant experience on the nrf line, including the 52xx series.
rurban 5y ago
I write baremetal fw for those chips. No debugger, extremely bad stdlib which I rewrote, no qemu. Horrible modem interface. But still much more pleasent than Linux FW or raspi's. They are cheap, last 10 years with a single battery, and do only what they need to do. Also secure. No crazy attack vectors. And easily symbolically verifiable. And I wrote tons of simulators and fuzzers for them.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Let me flip this around, I am looking for ways to improve testing, specially now that I am mostly remote. In your experience, what targets have a stress-free experience with qemu emulation?
  - rurban 5y ago
    Working on it in my github rurban/qemu-stm32 fork. Checkout supported platforms for qemu and better renode. There you also have debugging interfaces. Stressfree qemu support was only for my even smaller avr targets, the 1281. But AVR is crazy compared to the Cortex-M4. We switched to arm completely, no avr's anymore. Anyway, no need for qemu or other emulators, when you can easily write simulators. You just throw in some mmaps, the simulated libc, the UART, and networking. Much better than emulators.
    - patricktlo 5y ago
      Your simulations sound super interesting, I'd love to read more if you're willing to write about it!
      - jononor 5y ago
        Not the parent, but I wrote a little bit about this here: https://www.jonnor.com/2017/03/host-based-simulation-for-embedded-systems/ https://www.jonnor.com/2017/03/host-based-simulation-for-emb... The key thing is to make the majority of the code portable enough to run on a PC. I find the best way to do that is to keep things data-oriented, using Plain Old Data type data structures and pure functions as much as possible. Alternative view: isolate out any device-specific pieces, like I/O into as small and simple pieces as possible. When one takes this mindset one realizes that even things that are considered as "device specific", like device drivers usually have a lot of logic that can actually be separate from the I/O. And by having a swappable I/O backend (say for I2C) one can actually test the vast majority of this logic on a computer. One should also have an implementation of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that is "host", allowing to run on a PC, potentially with virtual inputs and outputs. This allows to run essentially all of the firmware on a PC. If one uses a embedded-friendly test framework, like Unity, then one can also run the same tests that is used on the PC on the device - to make sure that there is no difference when ran on host vs device. Unfortunately, the code from embedded device vendors is rarely amenable to this, so that code can end up as "untestable" under this scheme. For them portability" is only considered between their own hardware devices, not to a computer. Then one has to trust that they have done their own QA. Which is usually not that great - looking at you ST HAL....
floatboth 5y ago
nRF52s are definitely not extremely cheap, they're high-quality fully-documented dev-friendly chips with lots of onboard resources. If you want cheapest BLE, there's some utter crap from Dialog Semiconductor that comes with a proprietary SDK in ROM and one-time programmable (!!) memory for the application (external flash can be used in development). And you DO NOT have to use the Nordic SDK, there are lots of better and fully FOSS options — Apache Mynewt, libopencm3, Rust nrf-rs…

heavyset_go 5y ago

This is cool, and I enjoy foone's tweets about hacking around on embedded electronics you can buy at your local pharmacy. I just hope the unscrupulous don't have a field day with the potential spin this story and headline can have.

bobsmooth 5y ago

The chip is $4. The test is much more expensive than that.

aetherspawn 5y ago
And it’s about half price @ 1000 units.
55873445216111 5y ago
The Digi-Key price is $4. The direct price when buying millions of units will be a fraction of the Digi-Key price.
gst 5y ago
The expensive price of the tests is actually a whole different problem. For the last tests that I bought at Walgreens (InteliSwab) I paid around $25 for two tests. Meanwhile I'm currently in Europe and as a consumer I can buy Antigen tests for around 3 Euro per test (would be less than 2 Euro if bought in bulk). As far as I know those prices are not subsidized.
- cdtwigg 5y ago
  Propublica has been covering this, the FDA has been throwing up barriers to rapid tests while Europe has been embracing them. One of the barriers is that "users are supposed to be able to execute the test without training " which I suspect is what's leading to the inclusion of optical sensors etc. https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-rapid-test-just-weeks-into-the-pandemic-heres-why-you-still-cant-get-it https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-...
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Which is pretty much an impossible goal - the user still needs to be able to follow quite detailed instructions to get the sample, correctly mix in the buffer solution, and dose the correct number of drips. Sure, thats something 99% of people can do, but then 99% of people can see 1 or 2 lines on the test without the help of an app...

exmadscientist 5y ago

Nordic is not really that cheap if you just want a Cortex-M4. You buy Nordic parts for their radios. If you just want processing power, GigaDevices has an M4 at less than $1 last I checked. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work for the design we were working on as the standby power consumption wasn't great.

monocasa 5y ago
I don't think they wanted an M4 per se, but instead wanted a bluetooth radio to save on the cost of a screen. The Nordic chip just happens to be based around an M4.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  IIRC Nordic has a M0 version with bluetooth radio--the BBC micro:bit and a few other maker boards used it. But perhaps it's not really available in cheap quantities anymore and a way overpowered M4 is what they got.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Yeah, those are the nrf51x line, this is the nrf52x line. It seems from the outside at least that Nordic is pushing the nrf52x hard even in price conscious designs. Even the micro::bit was respun for a v2 with a nrf52x also (including it's M4). Albeit I don't have much direct data on that.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      Yes, the 51 is really old by now. The 52 line extends down as far as the tiny nRF52805. The 51822 is not nearly as fun to work with as the 52s, e.g. current Apache Mynewt with NimBLE doesn't even fit into the 51's tiny flash, the 51 doesn't have systick, and so on.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
If you want bargain basement processors with connectivity, Qualcomm is still selling many of the old CSR chips. The low end chips went for <$0.50 in volume and the power consumption was often barely worth measuring. We used to chuck them into products every time every time I lost an argument with the hardware team about whether 10-15 cents of BOM cost is worth 3 months of painful bringup.

abeyer 5y ago

So how long before someone starts buying up covid tests to strip these out again and resell to the supply chain challenged?

ekianjo 5y ago
The tests are not cheap
paxys 5y ago
Buy a $40 test to resell a $2 chip. Genius.
- mrunkel 5y ago
  They’ll make up for it in volume!

ctdonath 5y ago

sodality2 5y ago
wrong thread methinks
- bener 5y ago
  It's a post from the same Twitter user that posted this teardown.

c-smile 5y ago

Do we have Doom running on it?

ekianjo 5y ago
as mentioned in the thread it would need more RAM to do so
programmarchy 5y ago
Depends if the test comes out positive or negative.

fnord77 5y ago

funny there's a chip shortage for certain chips. yet here are disposable chips...

ip26 5y ago

This is depressing. Single use disposable. Full of copper, gold, tungsten, halfnium. Will leach poison into the ground. Some of the most advanced technology of our age. Use it once, toss it in the trash. Meanwhile the paper versions work just fine.

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aeternum 5y ago
We've made significant advancements in catalytic converters over the last decade and many waste management centers are able to incinerate much of the trash without the toxic emissions. They can then use magnets and eddy current separators to extract nearly all the metals out of the resulting ash.
- jraph 5y ago
  This is new to me. But even if it's true, it still requires a lot of energy to produce the chip and then apply the waste management you mention. The best waste is the one that does not exist.
malwarebytess 5y ago
The optics on this seem to indicate that it is just a lateral flow test of some kind. It's not even different. Instead of having to interpret a couple lines you have software interpret the strip and tell you over bt on your phone. So much tech for so little.
- new299 5y ago
  In the Lucira test is a bit more justifiable it's a full molecular test, with built in controls, better accuracy than lateral flow. The optics is pretty neat too: https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid

ir193 5y ago

edit: was wrong about the test price. It should be $38.99 / ea test.

wcunning 5y ago

So my followup question is: I have a few of these, can I do anything with them once I'm done with the test? Hook up to the headers and reprogram? What about the Binax test? Or any of the other "connected" ones?

wcunning 5y ago
Answering my own question: he gets there much later in the thread -- looks like single wired debug is available at a pad on the board. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1475268224635662336 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1475268224635662336
stbtrax 5y ago
probably not worth your time unless you're looking for an art project. you can get a devkit for dollars that has pins brought out and more flash and ram https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001593980172.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001593980172.html
numpad0 5y ago
Basically all those nRF5x products are Arduino compatible AirTags with a battery included. IIRC they also have an imprecise but low power, chip integral temperature gauge. Maybe a wireless interval thermometer might be a good start?
- antoniuschan99 5y ago
  Yea I saw somewhere airtags are just Nordic chips? Kind of surprised because the airpod w1/h1 chips aren’t
  - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
    I would guess either better margins or better low power performance for better battery longevity in the nRF 52.
theta_d 5y ago
Binax is just some cardboard and a strip, no chips.

joe1138 5y ago

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!

wcunning 5y ago

Note: Hackaday discussion available at https://hackaday.com/2021/10/17/electronic-covid-test-tear-down-shows-frustrating-example-of-1-time-use-waste/ https://hackaday.com/2021/10/17/electronic-covid-test-tear-d...

joezydeco 5y ago

Having worked on automated ELISA equipment decades ago, it's kind of interesting to see this come full circle. The earliest machines used a light source and color filter to try and get the signal from the finished enzyme sandwich. Then lateral-flow came along and it was up to a human to make the observation. Now we're back to the computer doing it again.

iszomer 5y ago

I would have understood an IoT widget for the purpose of contact tracing but for this instead? ...

qbasic_forever 5y ago

FYI some of those Ellume brand tests were recalled: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/ellume-recalls-covid-19-home-test-potential-false-positive-sars-cov-2-test-results https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e...

new299 5y ago

The Lucira test is in my opinion a bit more interesting: https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid They include an STM32, but the instrument is performing an Isothermal PCR molecular test which makes the inclusion of a microcontroller a requirement. Obviously throwing out electronics like this seems quite wasteful. But overall our society is fairly wasteful when it comes to disposable electronics.

Rebelgecko 5y ago
The Cue testing devices are interesting. The Bluetooth, battery, and most of the interesting bits are all in a reusable device with a slot for single-use cartridges. The cartridges are fairly dumb (other than the chemical stuff I think there's just an i2c chip)
bloopernova 5y ago
Wow, that is wonderfully complex! I do wish that there was an established recycling pipeline available for them though.
amelius 5y ago
> They include an STM32 This might explain partly why they are all sold out :(
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Hey man, cut me deep here. I need STM to get their stuff together and ship product. The next batch of product I ship is already at a loss because I’m buying from scalpers :( I’m just lucky we’re a non-electronics business that shipes electronics parts. If we were an electronics company, I would seriously consider a year hiatus, or switch to software contracting for awhile.

evan_ 5y ago

I wonder why they didn’t use NFC. They could get away with a much simpler chip, or even a fully analog solution if they didn’t need the complexity of Bluetooth. Seems like you could just about accomplish the same thing with a pair of NFC tokens, a photodiode, and some transistors. Basic components. Connect one of the two NFC chips to the coil depending on how much light is reflected off the test strip. When you scanned it with your phone the activated NFC chip would respond with a URL containing a unique ID which could be interpreted by the manufacturer.

logbiscuitswave 5y ago
Or if they are already using Nordic chips, slightly more expensive nRF52832 can also do NFC.
sofixa 5y ago
One reason i can think is that NFC wasn't ubiquitous on non-premium phones a few years ago, unlike Bluetooth.
- tyingq 5y ago
  It still isn't ubiquitous. For example, the Moto G line of cheap Androids are popular, and most have no NFC.
tjoff 5y ago
Because of apple.
- tjoff 5y ago
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bushbaba 5y ago
iPhones only relatively recently started supporting nfc for non payment use cases. https://blog.nordicsemi.com/getconnected/native-nfc-support-in-new-iphone https://blog.nordicsemi.com/getconnected/native-nfc-support-...

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sydthrowaway 5y ago

Why don’t we have biodegradable chips?

johannes1234321 5y ago
Because we don't tax cheap non-biodegradable things and don't really care about dismissal. We could subsidize research into biodegradables, though ...

roeles 5y ago

For those interested: I ported FreeRTOS 9 to an nRF52840 in my previous job. This family used a lot. It's in my Tado smart radiator knobs, in the AirTags. I can only compare it to FreeScale chips, but one thing that pleasantly surprised me is the flexibility in pin-assignment. Instead of the pin-mux that we'd have to do on the MK24, I could just assign pins during usb/i2c init without any limitations. The SDK is quite elaborate, although sometimes a bit difficult to use in C++.

londons_explore 5y ago
An any-to-any IO multiplexer turns out to be pretty large in silicon area. You're paying extra for that feature as opposed to devices where each pin has a choice of just say 3 functions. For most users, they prefer to have the chips cheaper and spend an extra few minutes of engineer time figuring out which pins need to be hooked up to what. I can see for smaller volume devices where engineer time dominates, and devices that you want to be really field reconfigurable, the all-to-all mux is worth it though.
- roeles 5y ago
  Thanks for the insight! I didn't choose the nRF, it was a given. I believe it was chosen due to being similar to the MK24 (also an M4) and having Bluetooth. The chips ended going into wearables, and BTLE was seen as the way to configure/upgrade the devices.

dmix 5y ago

US paid $230M to have this device built. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/02/01/us-231m-deal-ellume-at-home-covid-19-test.html https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/02/01/us-231m-deal-ellume-at...

kristopolous 5y ago
I can't help but imagine a parking lot full of Ferraris at their offices Maybe I'm Elizabeth Holmsing it, but I'm thinking it could have been done for 1/50th that price while still paying people well and providing them the resources they need. Am I missing something?
- lanternfish 5y ago
  Money is remarkably adept at reducing red tape to ribbons. I think this is a timeframe/certainty axis more than an efficacy/cost one.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  This goes into a bit more detail. https://www.mcknightshomecare.com/ellume-receives-230m-government-contract-to-ramp-up-production-of-at-home-covid-19-test/ https://www.mcknightshomecare.com/ellume-receives-230m-gover...
tssva 5y ago
They paid $230 million for 8.1 million devices and the building of a US based manufacturing facility capable of producing 19 million devices a month.

AlexanderDhoore 5y ago

As a European: why are there chips in this? I just broke open mine and it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/muz7FIy https://imgur.com/a/muz7FIy I bought 50 of these 2 weeks ago. Were 3-4 euro a piece.

mrunkel 5y ago
It’s for the Bluetooth piece. The optical sensor reads the result and the turns on the light and/or lets the phone know over Bluetooth. Seems unnecessary, but if people want to buy it…
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  > Seems unnecessary, but if people want to buy it… Considering that this is an article used once for a few minutes the environmental cost for production and deposition is high and society shouldn't tolerate ...
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Once for this specific test. If you planned on buying a lot of tests and using them regularly, maybe you could find value in a BLE connection? IDK. That crosses into a different new normal line for me that I am uninterested in I think. Otherwise, I agree, seems wasteful when you look at what had to happen to ship that product.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      If you do mass testing the Bluetooth might be useful in theory, but you babe to make sure to protect the data well ...
  - pixl97 5y ago
    The environmental cost of getting more people sick with covid is also high.
    - 5y ago

infologics 5y ago

[dead]

Havoc 5y ago

Seems like unnecessary e-waste to me.

Fnoord 5y ago

Also see this previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29637592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29637592 (Faking a Positive Covid Test (f-secure.com))

daneel_w 5y ago

I can't believe even a fractional percentage of customers would find it useful to have wireless interaction with a disposable single-use test kit, compared to reading the result off of a passive testing strip. It would've been reedemable if they had sold the strips as a separate replacable product so that the electronic device could be fully utilized.

belter 5y ago
It might have its uses...If for privacy reasons, the testing subject is in a closed room and you want to make sure they report from the correct test.
- daneel_w 5y ago
  What if the patient doesn't have a smartphone (or don't know how to pair/operate Bluetooth), or too many active test kits are lingering in the patient waiting room making it impossible to navigate all the devices? I don't see how this particular SKU would be a good fit for a clinic. Easier and cheaper to just give the patient a passive test strip they can use in their own privacy.
  - belter 5y ago
    The point is that the patient might have a previous one and show that one instead as negative...or lie about the result...niche scenarios, but is this not an niche use case anyway?

hansihe 5y ago

I just flew in to Minneapolis from Europe last night and they handed these out for free at the airport. Was really surprised to see the Bluetooth sign on the box.

theHIDninja 5y ago

So this is where all the chips are going during the shortage. Good to know we finally get some answers to that.

rasz 5y ago

~$30 and they werent even good "Ellume Recalls COVID-19 Home Test for Potential False Positive SARS-CoV-2 Test Results" https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/ellume-recalls-covid-19-home-test-potential-false-positive-sars-cov-2-test-results https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e...