Bodybytes Implant

[Satur9]

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.

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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:

• VoCore2 development board
  MT7628_Full.pdf (9.6 MB)

• BQ51013B Qi wireless receiver

Some next steps are:

• 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:

@TallowyCape @ThePolishedTurd @Devilclarke

[TallowyCape]

nice

[amal]

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.

[Eriequiet]

Yesss, my body is ready

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?

[Satur9]

@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.

[Satur9]

@amal

I think something like this will ultimately need to be encapsulated in something other than our flex polymer… probably high durometer silicone or pmma.

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.

@amal

which could allow for media replacement if it every failed

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 ?

[Zwack]

Has anyone defined a list of requirements for this?

FTP was mentioned, but HTTP? HTTPS?

Piratebox (now dead) had chat software as well, but this seems more like a data archive solution to me.

Is it intended to be mostly read or frequent writes?

[TallowyCape]

the vocore runs openwrt, so you can basically put whatever you want on it. you could def put a web server or an irc server on it. rn the plan is to see what everyone wants, and then make an app with the features that most people want. basically if you can do it on linux you can do it on this board but it might need to be custom because of the architecture of the vocore. (mips) (you totally could add your own apps) sorry for my weird wording and my lack of proper punctuation im pretty tired rn

[Devilclarke]

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.

[Zwack]

Thanks for the answers, FTP is not a protocol I would include by default these days, which was why I asked.

[Devilclarke]

I think there was conversation of sftp and something else about ssh but I’m out of my depth there.

[Zwack]

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.

[robt]

Amazing. I was always tempted by Pegleg but the size of it put me off.

This is a nice compact form.

Not sure how I can contribute, but if there is anything I can do please let me know.

[non-bin]

I don’t think the software matters at this point… Like at all. Let’s get the hardware to work, and then like @TallowyCape said

@TallowyCape

if you can do it on linux you can do it on this board

We can let the community design software once the hard (ware) part is done

[Zwack]

I’m not a hardware person, but I can do a decent imitation of a software person.

[TallowyCape]

i think i can get behind this post.

[Satur9]

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.

[non-bin]

Oh I didn’t know, that’s awesome!

I’d love to help with software then, my first concern is that Linux takes a few seconds to boot at best, how can we get around that?

[Eriequiet]

Maybe it’s just me or perspective, but the new setup looks larger than the original SD card…
Was there no way to make the original pcb work?

[non-bin]

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?