Community Project: Bodybytes
Anyone who would like to contribute feel free to add your thoughts here. If you need to make purchases to support your contribution to the project, see this thread, and direct message @amal or @Satur9 with details. Project threads can get a little out of hand with tons of people brainstorming. I ask that you limit your messages to the topic at hand. Try to condense multiple messages into one post.
This community project has been in the works for awhile. The idea is to create a smaller, more reliable, and mass producible version of the Pegleg. The project was originally started by @Chimpofm when he located these Flashair WiFi SD cards. We encountered some sourcing issues, and their interface was unreliable, so we moved on to creating a more custom solution.
The current project requirements are:
Must be encapsulated in the flex biopolymer
More reliable software than PirateBox
Field programmable over WiFi
Powered by Qi wireless charging
Large storage capacity with software fixes that preserve the flash memory
The inconvenience of needing to carry a Qi charger to use it will be mitigated by the increasing prevalence of cell phones (like the Pixel 5) with reverse wireless charging. In the meantime there are plenty of battery banks with built in Qi charging. Here are some of the parts we have been testing out and are planning to use in the prototype:
Designing and testing out the software (currently people are trying out FTP servers)
Designing and testing a miniature Qi charging circuit (That has been in my court but I haven’t had the bandwidth)
This is by no means the entirety of the information available about this project, I’m just trying to parse it down. Current collaborators (mostly on Discord) are:
I think something like this will ultimately need to be encapsulated in something other than our flex polymer… probably high durometer silicone or pmma. I like the idea of silicone though because it should, in theory, be more easily removable from the final product which could allow for media replacement if it every failed. The actual control board for this is the more difficult piece to find, so using an encapsulation material that would allow for easier repair is a good idea.
I was trying to follow this project on the discord but I hate discord. It’s hard to read from the beginning or know what the current state of things is
Have you done any preliminary tests to see if a Qi charger works to power it?
I figured a custom antenna would need to be figured out to output a power SD card equivalent voltage
And transfer speed tests? Any tests thru a simulated flesh medium?
@ThePolishedTurd has successfully hooked up a vocore2 to a commercially available Qi receiver (see picture at end of original post)
If I recall correctly @Chimpofm has attempted to use a Flashair in a plastic bag underwater. We may have just spoken about it though. Flesh will certainly affect the data rate.
The idea was to test it all out with the vocore development board, but then move everything over to a custom flex PCB with minimum z-height. Something like this:
The large unpopulated region around the perimeter which is necessary for the Qi charging coil could be used to create a resin slope, which would aid biopolymer encapsulation.
Can we get more people’s opinion on flash integrity? Flash seems like the only viable option as far as memory density (FRAM would be more durable but is low density). Is there any way we can use flash memory but still have the implant last ?
The original idea was a webpage that allowed navigation of files with an upload download feature. Honestly keeping it as simple to use as possible was the leading requirement.
The ability to play media directly would be great a good addition.
There was also conversation on having a option on the Web interface to enable ssh, ftp ect. Probably under and advanced tab password protected and such.
Ssh provides encrypted transport, it is not uncommon to use it for sftp or scp as well. Unless you want to provide anonymous ftp access that seems like a better route to me.
If you want to provide anonymous ftp then there are some very lightweight servers that excel at that task.
Since the vocore2 board is already ready to be prototyped with, I was hoping people could start experimenting with the software. You could consider the hardware “done” because we’re just going to transplant it as is onto a custom flex PCB. While everyone is working out the software (which could take awhile) myself and/or anyone else who wants to can attempt to design a Qi receiver.
Has anyone started a repo of some description? My first thought is a read only busybox os, with a web interface based on prasathmani/tinyfilemanager, I’ve used it before, it’s open source and writen in PHP (not everyone’s favorite language I know, but it works)
I say read only because we don’t really want it bricking during an update, maybe a hall effect sensor to boot into a recovery mode?
Also what are the specs of the board?
EDIT: Sorry I’m new to this, apparently busybox isn’t a self contained OS, so something like Ubuntu core, or striped down debian maybe?
The “firmware” on vocode is based on Openwrt which is a Linux distribution for routers. I am already running openwrt myself, and have just ordered a vocode (with USB and Micro SD card).
When it arrives I will see how tiny an openwrt I can put onto it and get at least a basic setup built and documented. From there it is a question of what packages people want to add.
I am assuming a DHCP server, wireless access point, and a web server are the absolute minimum. Probably also SSH for additional management…
What’s the point of a minimal custom built openwrt setup?
Surely you want it as fully featured as possible as I doubt you will be reinstalling the OS and how much space would you save given the standard firmware is only 4.3MB iirc the firmware from vocore has hopefully also had a decent amount of testing/validation already.
Also if anyone ordering one for dev, the ones in cases with Ethernet etc are really nice imo. Ultimate I think they call em.
I kinda agree, storage space isn’t much of a commodity these days, so as long as it doesn’t impact performance (or the features can be turned off) then we should have everything we can fit
