With what I have planned, the Bluetooth transponders should be within 4" of each other with just skin in between them. I’m unsure of the diffusive properties of those kinds of signals but do you think that a layer of flesh will prevent it from connecting entirely? I really don’t need crazy fast transfers, considering the data that needs to move back and forth is going to be pretty much just raw signal data for the medical application (I would rather parse it with the more powerful computer anyways), but for multipurpose applications I’d want it to be as efficient as possible. I wasn’t aware of another method of wireless data transmission other than BT and WiFi that could reasonably fit on the board. As for why I think implanting it would be a good idea, it’s mostly for data collection, and convience. This way when you wake up in the morning you only have to put on a watch, instead of an entire sensor array. Even if we had a safe implantable power source, you’d need another device to actually do anything with the data, otherwise you just have a chip in you that knows stuff and has no way to tell you about it other than a single Led.
As someone who works with a shit ton of cr2032 I’ll say I haven’t seen them ever explode… but I’ve also never marinated them in body juice,
But they vent a surprising amount of gas, I don’t with whatever lithium ish gas they vent in my body thanks
Problem is transdermal isnt secure, and rejects and gets infected, or easily ripped out of skin
As soon as we can run contacts thru the skin I’m doing internal data storage, but interacting with stuff beneath the skin is proving tricky
If you are wearing a battery and dealing with bt then you may as well use a smart watch which also has a screen and vibration.
Well, the amount of data isn’t that big on an implanted device. There’s no power supply strong enough to run flash memory and to only alternative would be FRAM, but those have max 4 Mbit at the moment. It takes somewhere between 10 and 15 min to charge the 400 µAh solid state battery on the implant which would be enough to download the 512 Byte from the FRAM which requires not even a minute with a very slow transfer rate.
Of course one could be brave and do the “Pegleg” approach with the Lithium battery and the SD-Card, than the data transfer rate becomes important.
By the way, this board uses a CR2032 battery which isn’t rechargeable. That would be the LIR2032 which has way less power density than its non rechargeable counterpart. With other words there’s no circuitry on this board for wireless charging. Even if you would install that extra electronic detail, it has to have some good battery protection to prevent all those nasty side effects which can happen during charging.
Agree 100% to that and it has to go somewhere…
But hey guy’s don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage anyone it’s your body go for it and give it a try.
Except afaik no Pegleg released so far has had a lithium battery - instead it’s been Qi powered. I believe that later versions might have a battery, but will likely also be available without one.
See above: Qi wireless charging (except only used for power) has been proven to work in implants… without a battery, and using WiFi for data transmission. However, if you mean specifically NFC / RFID powered implants, then that’s a different matter.
People definitely assess risk / reward and their own comfort level combined with expectations and decide whether they want to try something risk. Hell, see the EL wire implants, Northstar V1 with CR2325 non-rechargeable lithium coin batteries, Northsense, Firefly V1 and V2, DT M31 magnets, flexNExT, other various magnets and coatings, Pegleg V1, etc.
So many things have been tried just for the sake of it despite the risks, and things have been learned from that and newer / better things have been released. Pegleg V2/V2.5/V3???, Titan sensing biomagnet, Northstar V2???, xGLO, flexMN/flexMT to name a few.
Also in general, some of us do things for the sake of it, despite there being more practical ways of doing the exact same thing. Or we do it for aesthetics. There’s many valid reasons for doing things / taking risks / experimenting.
Most of all, thanks Amal for putting up with our weird, crazy and wonderful ideas, and continuing to release amazing cutting-edge products.
Yep! I plan on designing one to use as a display/power source/wireless programmer. The biggest reason I want to base it off of Raspberry Pi Zero is so that it’ll be highly configurable and will include haptics with an LCD. This actually won’t be my first raspberry pi smartwatch (though it’ll be a lot smaller than my last one, since that was a 4B). I want to run some tests with the Puck before I start working on the watch however, as Satur9 brought up a very good point about possibility of the BT signal diffusing as it passes through flesh.
Simply put: Speed of data transfer
There are just so many reasons!!
One could ask “why would someone implant a device that does nothing?”
Well… piercings? xLED?
You do it because you like how it looks.
Or perhaps because that is yet another step on one’s journey of self discovery/improvement.
And if those are not enough reasons… just out of the top of my head:
-
Because you might want to have some data storage always with you and well hidden. It is easy to hide the power device “in plain sight” even in scenarios where data devices would not be allowed.
Think… “photographer in north Korea”? or “pentester”? -
Because the sooner someone does that, the closer we get to having a version which might not need external power, or when we get implantable power sources, we would already have a fine tuned implant to use it.
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or my personal favourite: “We do what we must, because we can.”
That is a very common and fairly widespread misconception.
Water hampers them, but do not stop the transmission.
I posted somewhere else on the forum some tests with a friend’s wifi SD under water. works just fine.
On another note…
One Idea I was thinkering with would be to use a 12 point flex pcb LED strip in red, and another in green, side by side.
Antenna on the side.
You get a skin patch battery+coil…
And we have an implanted Watch!
A single battery+coil pack is small and lightweight to be worn on the wrist just like a nicotine patch. You could not wear a watch face on the wrist through a patch so easily.
We could even add:
One swipe of your phone to update the time, if needed.
A sensor to detect touch, and we can have a chrono!
Increase the number of LEDs on the second strip and you have more precise time!
etc,etc,etc…
I admit I totally stole that line as my personal moto, and am not a single bit ashamed of it! 
Did you check out what @Locutus mentioned recently
Would that be suitable? Its smaller than the Zero
No WiFi / BT / NFC unfortunately 
- but it’s an interesting piece of hardware
The pico is just a flexible microcontroller, so it’s actually more comparable to the Puck.js than the Pi Zero. The microcontroller definitely has other applications, but they’re more similar to a smaller arduino in that they can really only run programs/control peripherals and aren’t really “standalone” computers. You’d need a different device to store and change programs.
I read that less politically, and more hacker/maker
“I do because I can, and also why not?”
I would say fortunately
Give it a single WiFi module and it will have less power consumption than the Zero!
Actually, I love the raspi zero v1.31… it’s about $5 a piece (or used to be. can’t find them anywhere anymore), and has no pesky BT/WiFi!!
Now if I want to keep using Zeros for one of my projects, I got to pay about 3/4x more for something that I will need to manually pluck the wifi module out!!
I would gladly trade Zero W for Zero v1.31 at any time!
And the pico lacks the camera module and processing speed for that project. 
One of the many reasons I like that moto is because it can always follow my mood!
I stumbled across this while compiling parts lists. Thought you might like it lol
Thanks!! I did like it!
Appreciate the thought!
the problem with that shop is “max per customer: 1”
Combine that with the shipping costs and it’s cheaper for me to buy 2 Zero Ws elsewhere… 
If they had no limit… I would be ordering a dozen of those right now!
(I actually do need a dozen zeros for a new ML poc cctv system I’m putting together)
You could probably send them an email and ask them for a custom offer if you are intent on buying a dozen
I did.
I hope their policy of “We do not accept purchase orders from customers outside of the United States.” won’t get in the way. 
Amazing how hard they make it to sell their own stuff!
I mean… could always get a middle man, jus sayin