Guys,
I work in a power electronics lab and have a lot of hobbyist experience designing digital PCBs. I am wondering If anyone would like to start a small discord to join a small team developing on this concept!
If there already is a discord that I do not know about please let me know! Thank you all so much for reading!
Yup, there already is a Discord it’s called Biohackers Digital it’s the community run discord, and there’s a channel called #bodybytes. A couple people are interested, specifically PJabbs, Xander52, and Miana. We’ve all had a lot of life stuff going on and not a lot of money so it’s been on hold, but we have a solid plan to move forward. Here’s a primer on the current status.
I’m planning some tangential stuff with Amal that may or may not overlap with this project.
Making some good progress on this project
Since the ball-grid array parts are kind of necessary we’re trying to determine if a PET flex PCB would be a viable option to vacuum uncured liquid resin under the soldered components and UV cure it through the PCB itself kind of like an underfill adhesive.
Aiming for MT7628AN chip with 256MB of RAM, 64MB NOR Flash for OpenWRT and uboot, and 128GB of eMMC flash for storage. Here’s a project directory
Ah forgot the polymer reservoir caps
can that antenna be folded over with a bit of ferrite polymer between?
I suspect that that’s the idea, the antenna has a cutout and all the components are in the center of the board.
Yup that’s the plan. Only 4.5mm thickness at the tallest. Do you think you could encapsulate that?
Yep. Can’t wait
This is getting me excited 
I think I’ve settled on the final layout. The white is where the charging coil folds over onto some ferrite. There’s also an IR phototransistor and omnipolar hall effect sensor as options for booting into recovery. I still need to do routing so it will be another week or two before I can order and lunar new year means no testing until late March. We’re at 43 x 23.65 x 3.5mm
We’re gonna need a bigger needle.
@Satur9 Curiosity has gotten the better of me, and I gotta ask, Where do you see that being put? People are gonna try different stuff obviously, and God bless, but what would you consider the most likely / useable locations? Bicep? Sternum? Forearm? Just really really really curious what your thinking is.
Outer thigh so you can put your phone or a wireless charger battery bank in your pocket to run it. I’ll also be designing an optional companion device with three Qi charging coils that you can strap to yourself for reliable power over time. It will likely also have a infrared led or electromagnet to trigger recovery more reliably
So far we’re using OpenWRT with opkg to deploy functions and uboot to manage recovery if we can do so reliably. Planned functions are: file server, offline Wikipedia webhost, offline maps webhost, and if the device can handle it a travel mate VPN routing host to act as an access point for external devices to use your phones connection.
What storage size and rough transfer speeds are you thinking?
What I want to try to do is get Wi-Fi mesh working on a few of these things and essentially turn it into a cyborg P2P internet. I bet I could also get something like IPFS or Secure Scuttlebutt running on top of that.
See post 129 in this thread for the memory specs. You’ll also see a project directory link. The documentation is still being fleshed out in parallel with development, but it’s very robust.
For transfer rates I’m not sure, there’s a lot of factors. Running gossa as a file server on a vocore outside the body I was getting 650kbps. We have another file server opkg in mind or may roll our own that is more efficient. I also selected an antenna topology that will be better performing than the vocore. The body will significantly attenuate the signal though so I’m not sure. It’ll probably be bad, but there was never any way around that. I picked the best options I can based on the design constraints
Unless there’s a solution to the transdermal seal problem, that’s the best that can be done…
And that would also solve the battery problem now that I think about it.
