The miniaturized sunbox is a wrist watch

The smart watch is a watch that integrates a motion based electricity generator and several display, audio DSP, video DSP microcontrollers microcontrollers stacked vertically on a watch-like power system using a highly specialized lithium-ion battery. These microcontrollers all have an independent wireless interface device that they use to communicate between each other, but encased in appropriately shielded Gaussian enclosure such that they comply with local FCC regulations.

 

Each microcontroller is designed to interoperate independently of the other microcontrollers as a service, creating a modular and expandable design that can be easily modified to include new features.

 

Each controller incorporates a momentum-based rotary device that generates electricity through rapid motion of the device as well as a small integrated band on either side of the display for accumulating solar energy.

 

The watch has a 1 cm x 1 cm display that is a touchscreen. It integrates with a head mounted display wirelessly over a Bluetooth or similar connection. It has two buttons on the side that are abstracted as mouse clicks to correspond to the trackball touchscreen.

 

Although I think @Asus really deserves the partnership on this one

 

This device incorporates a proprietary low-powered design architecture and toolchain using specialized instructions incorporated into the program automatically to save power.

 

Under Chinese patent law, it could be replicated, but not marketed in the USA without a partnership.

 

Wireless Selector Guide http://www.silabs.com/products/wireless/pages/default.aspx …

 

Expandable features include

 

An integrated video camera for video chat and playback on the device.

 

An integrated projector for display.

 

Integrated display with a nearby wireless television device.

I would love to partner with somebody like @ToshibaUSA or @samsung to productize this invention

 

Or possibly give up and be acquired by @google for fabrication

 

Patent pending "GMS Smart Watch"

 

It is much like the watches in Dick Tracy.






UPDATE(s):


User stories in development.


As an astute reader probably guessed, this device wishes to employ RF energy harvesting technology. Its special capacitor design it has in common with the sunbox is key in this capacity or role.





The design will incorporate an emulated animation of a standard watch face that makes it appear to be a standard watch that is backlit at night when it is not in use.




The design shall incorporate a rotary style telephone dialing system in addition to the 9-key approach.




The device shall support normal music playback through headphones or through a Bluetooth headset using the same hardware as telephony.


The device employs a clockwork mechanism to switch a cathode tube ray from projecting a reverse image onto an opaque, curved spherical screen located inside of the device to projecting onto an arbitrary surface.  This clockwork mechanism is built directly into the integrated circuit.


The device employs a rotary linkage to a small electric motor and capacitor that allows it to charge a lithium-ion battery.




A provisional patent for this design, as well as an exploratory patent for a design that is miniaturized to a ring is being prepared and may already be in shipment by the time you read this.

For the perplexed

A coordinated community project from Gaius Municipal Services 

Nicholas Hall on twitter 

Nicholas Hall is well known by an alias "Damius" which is a hidden representation of his last name he has used for over 16 years in internet relay chat communities and represents a Hellenized form of wordplay and is a DBA alternative to Gaius Municipal Services. It also has roots in ancient Iranian languages and is seen as an important name to Nicholas Hall in his individual, esoteric and very unique cultural belief system. In English, it pronounced A as in "Day", followed by "me", followed by "us." Its pronunciation may vary in Hellenistic, Semitic and Aryan languages. It is usually used exclusively as a nickname to those close to Nicholas Hall such as family members, almost always without the "-us", simply as "day-mee."

Nick HATES cults, and has a personal vendetta to destroy all cults. As a matter of course in this profession, he studies them intensively. He is a firm believer in freedom of religion and believes people should be free from criminal religious manipulation of any kind, especially when it involves forcing people into joining using things such as threats or deception. He studies theology to distinguish cults from the many diverse legitimate religions of the world and believes in the unity of the human spirit.

Some of Nick's forebears were European crusaders and members of religious orders. He does not endorse this activity but is interested in its history.

Gaius Municipal Services takes its "Gaius" from "Gaius Julius Caesar," a flawed historical figure who laid a lot of pipe. It's cognate to the word Gaia for Earth but in common Latin means something like "List." In its acronym form, "GMS" is pronounced as "Grams," with the intended meaning of micrograms or milligrams.

SUNBOX is using indiegogo for its crowdfunding.

Nicholas Hall is an amateur population geneticist and bioinformatician to the delight and detriment of many in the scientific community. He has forensically verified his own haplogroup and origin independently using scientific research at least as far back as the middle of the 19th century and in some branches as far back as the 11th. He wishes to succeed so that he may support his ever-expanding and ever-aging family, as well as over-determine the story of their origin on planet Earth. He is Y-STR I2b1* and mtDNA J1b1a.

His academic interests include lambda calculus, medical imaging, optics and inorganic chemistry.

He also wishes to employ some local physical and cultural anthropologists to study Ohlone phylogeny in the San Francisco Bay Area before development destroys thousands of years of human history.

This is more information about Nick than necessary for SUNBOX but now nobody can say he has not disclosed everything.

Manifestos, rigidity of software processes and fluid creativity

Stop cramping my style, boss

We've all been there. The boss is demanding we follow a rigid software process and all we want to do is prototype a solution that demonstrates a more profound understanding of the problem then another proposed solution. 

Younger software engineers who show a great deal of aptitude often fall victim to this type of thinking, because for tasks that are beneath the scope of a few weeks of work, they are completely correct. 

If your task granularity and project load is incredibly low, say limited to homework programming assignments, you can absolutely attack the problems with an unstructured process such as rapid prototyping or just hack away.

However, I think it is actually beneficial for students, particularly for those seeking to join an embedded development community, to understand the kind of software process used by real hardcore engineering shops that deliver world-acclaimed products that save lives. 

 

Not only are these people on a mission to fix world problems, they are also keenly aware that they could be held responsible for deficiencies in the software. 

This article addresses C++, C or similar language-based embedded development in an integrated posix programming environment that employs agile methodologies and pair programming. It is the author's belief that this does not apply to softer sciences such as web services or script-based programming, even if that programming is compiled to actual instructions or if C and C++ code can be virtualized. 

No matter how execution of your code is performed, you must be able to fully model it and demonstrate it completely to the extent that would be satisfiable by a forensic investigation.

What goes wrong?

All software design involves risk. The key is to disambiguate risk vs management dysfunction vs programmer dysfunction. Usually, if something goes wrong, it is the result of a product of these factors.

When a software shop becomes dysfunctional, it is usually due to an abridgement or abortive use of this process in favor of fire fighting, rapid development, or vague and poorly understood alternative software processes, often in order to save the engineering team's reputation from the viewpoint of a hostile non-technical manager in sales, or to beat a competitor to the delivery of a feature in competing software.

It used to be the case that this process was at odds with a process often referred to as the "waterfall model." It is my belief that this "waterfall model" can be shown to be out of date even for complex engineering tasks like medical ventilators or motor vehicle control systems.

What is the new alternative? TDD specified design combined with integrated task tracking and source control.

A fully integrated software development environment should include a task management system such as Jira, a source control versioning system, as well as a fully articulated release and quality assurance cycle. 

Without these crucial elements, any agile environment will quickly descend into chaos, even if it is populated by very talented research and development engineers with doctoral degrees.

The biggest mistake I have seen in software shops is when teams get too adversarial with each other and do not interoperate with a sufficiently unified goal. This is not always due to the executive or manager's poor decisions, but can also occur because of:

• Geographic separation of teams causing rivalries, mutual social exclusion and dislike.

• Interpersonal conflict among staff due to diverse differences in upbringing.

• A single engineer who does not work well with others and excludes them from development decisions.

• Several engineers who do not produce quality code but depend on a single quality engineer for sustained effort.

• Talented engineers who produce quality code but are dismissive of management concerns and process accountability.

• Grandfathered engineers who no longer produce quality code, but have institutional knowledge crucial to company survival which they depend on for employment

Motivated by what I saw as past failures in software process, occasional non-technical mismanagement, and observation of incredibly effective management alternatives in the biomedical devices industries, I have decided to establish my own minimalist approach to engineering management that I feel combines the wisdom of all of my previous successes, failures and experiments.

The bare necessities and no more 

Here is my personal addendum to the well-composed and well-thought out agile manifesto.

• Engineering approaches should almost always be minimalist, because this usually reduces cost.

• Safety-critical engineering should be performed in pairs with task management and source control integrated directly into the software development environment.

• Creativity should never be restricted, but should always be integrated into the process. Any code produced by an engineer alone should be tracked and in source control. Coding alone when not assigned to a task should be encouraged and appreciated.

• Design acceptance criteria should be specified entirely using the unit tests. Extensive annotation and comments are unnecessary and a sign of poor code construction.

• Build release cycles, branch integration and build errors should be detected automatically by a build management system and blame assigned automatically. It may be reassigned at the appropriate management authority's prerogative.

• Commits should always occur in pairs and this process should be integrated into the version control system.

• Designers and web service engineers whose industry values expediency over code quality but whose artistic talent is seen to be valuable should be accommodated through an integration process that is as rigid as any other part of the project and conforms to basic engineering expectations and guidelines, such a testable design acceptance criteria.

• Any region of code, physical component, integrated circuit, or user interface that has a user story that is not testable by a design acceptance criteria is considered insufficient. A user story that is not testable is considered to be out of scope and non-information.

• Code analysis tools must be integrated into the build cycle and must include test coverage tools. An engineer should make his test design acceptance criteria his contract and as part of that contract be expected to show complete code coverage of all his tests. The mechanism through which this should be achieved should be agreed upon through engineering consensus of the entire administrative staff.  

Brevity, clarity, with redundancy only when necessary by design.

• Do less with more. Do just enough and no more. Save on costs.

• Work in pairs. Engineers hold each other accountable. Rotate pairs often.

• Do not restrict individual creativity when it is useful, but track it and save it diligently. 

• Keep unit tests minimal but sufficient, and time needed to understand them short. Break up any large test into smaller tests if it does not comply with this maxim.

• Build releases and assign blame automatically. Be flexible with humans. Assign responsibility using empirical evidence.

• Commit only in pairs and require two-level authentication of both engineers.

• Accommodate non-technical designers, but prevent them from introducing harmful code unintentionally.

• Keep designs testable or throw them out.

• Use empirical data alone to show test coverage.

Process, no matter how well designed or enforced, is no guarantee of code quality

Any belief that following a code development process rigidly guarantees an improved or even successful result is as silly as believing that prayer alone will heal a sick child and should be avoided. 

Talent is necessary but not sufficient for code quality. Process is necessary but not sufficient for code quality. Both are necessary but insufficient for code quality. Code quality is a factor of effective team management, mentorship of the most talented but sometimes impetuous junior engineers by tempering it through the wisdom of older engineers, and effective guidance of the executive and involvement of the executive at all levels of engineering.

As a follow up to these posts, we will be expanding our material to cover the following topics. Please stay tuned.

Coming soon 

• Specifying a C++ design entirely in unit tests
• A manager's view of integrated circuit design testability
• Design testability: It applies to engineering, too. 
• Acceptable risk is *testable* risk: Disambiguating mismanagement and bad engineering from acceptable risk using test criteria

A note on nuclear power

We must establish a green power infrastructure immediately or we shall see catastrophic ecological changes that could potentially claim human lives, as well as catastrophic economic externalities if not reigned in soon.

Consider this post from ISIS, the institute for science and international security. It is interesting to me how ISIS in Iraq chose a name identical to this one.

If we do not immediately make a concerted, cooperative and globally unilateral effort to deplete these dangerous isotopes immediately in a controlled manner, it could also spell nuclear doom for us.

The scientists of the world must speak out and agree that acting immediately on the three following issues is important, regardless of their original cause:

• Too Hot - Ecological calamity due to global warming
• Too Explosive - Nuclear doom due to poor security management
• Too Criminal - Aggressive misinformation and propaganda, enhanced interrogation and absolute media control due to governmental corruption

We must immediately stop any sort of this manipulation by taking responsibility and engaging industry, our peers in the public, our governments, our enemies and our world in a manner that resolves these problems with expediency.

Funding

• If we do not meet our funding goal in 60 days, all donations shall be refunded and we shall start a new funding cycle

• Funding shall be jointly controlled by the five trustees consisting of Nicholas Hall, two members of industry, and two academic representatives.

• We are soliciting donations in the Bay Area today and Monday.

• Keep an eye out for us!

SMS-CB Standards

Please take a hint from vodafone about the standards we will have to achieve:
FCC’s Consumer Factsheet
FEMA’s CMAS 
NOAA’s CMAS 
CTIA – The Wireless Association®’s WEA 
Examples future applications of SUNBOX technology  

Anticipated milestones upon receipt of funding

• +12 weeks - Generating enough electrical power to power ARM-based datacenter using solar panels should be achieved within 3 months of project start. This should include a prototype integrated circuit, large capacitors, rack, generator control system,  software, documentation and everything necessarily

• +18 weeks - The project should be powering an SMS antenna and notifying an administrative number of power status periodically.

• +24 weeks - The project should be filtering water, generating power and SMS messages in a manner fully compliant with military telemetry systems and with a fault tolerance testing and software bug fixing stages.

• +28 weeks - Project shall be completed and up for industry consideration.

Thoughts & Considerations

The SUNBOX 

• Modular design makes maintenance a snap. Simply put in a new SUNBOX or WATERBOX and take the old one to a service center to be maintained.

• Capacitive design makes the SUNBOX highly fault tolerant and scalable. An individual module simply quietly shuts down if insufficient electrical capacity is remaining and resumes as soon as power is restored.

• Water treatment should be easily integrated into any water source meeting design specifications for the liquid chemistry of treatment. This should include biomatter typically found in fresh water sources, but expandable to include salt water sources as well.

• SUNBOX containers are expected to be extremely low maintenance and require no maintenance beyond the product lifecycle of the rackmounted servers that they contain. 

• CAPBOX is an exploratory concept for an additional ISO container that contains no actual generation equipment but safely ensures electrical capacity for the SUNBOX during periods of low sunlight, such as overnight. A combination of SUNBOX, CAPBOX and WATERBOX products should be considered in combination for municipal production needs.

• WATERBOX water treatment containers are expected to have a higher maintenance cycle than SUNBOX containers. WATERBOX containers must be emptied periodically of biomatter and phosphorous compounds at a separate facility and have their filters cleaned or replaced at the end of their product life cycle. This should be the extent of the maintenance required for WATERBOX operation.

• The research target site shall consist of a secure perimeter with chain link fencing, remote CCTV equipment provided outsource or academic institution, room for at least one SUNBOX and WATERBOX, approximately 1000 square feet for solar panel generators, and approximately 50 square feet with 50 feet of vertical clearance for an SMS-CB capable antenna, and approximately 500 square feet with 10 feet of vertical clearance for ISO containers with hosing and gas connectivity. 

• A milestone for the research target site to achieve shall be complete independence from external power sources, with the capability of sending SMS messages about power status to a predefined number.

• A future vision for the project is a television broadcast sent over wireless broadband broadcast, but only if sufficient electrical wattage and capacitance can be demonstrated.

Fault Tolerance

Nicholas Hall, the starter of the SUNBOX project, wants to discuss fault tolerance design with you.

In an embedded system, the voltage being supplied to the integrated circuit may be measured and used as feedback for an embedded program.

Behavior of this program may be driven according to rules that do not depend on state, allowing an integrated circuit to be designed that can have rapid fluctuations in power but still sequentially execute a program.

Please observe this lowpass filter circuit.



If execution of the program is stateless, your only state is your program counter. The absolute worst case, even if you had no capacitative ability in your circuit, is that you lose your position in your program. Using a very simple capacitative design, a program may be designed that ensures it will not run unless it has sufficient capacitance to save the program counter.

This allows a circuit to be designed that is fault tolerant enough to run low-powered programs using only a very large capacitor and somewhat faulty and unreliable electrical generator.

This design can be generalized to suit almost any application with a desired predefined halting condition that does not depend on state or can shut down cleanly without power.

Messaging System

Q: What standards must we comply to?

A: In addition to providing standard SMS-CB broadcast capability, the SUNBOX should also support a standard military public key infrastructure such as X.509

It is acceptable to integrate a messaging system such as Lightweight Communications and Marshalling to fulfill this requirement.

Trustees

There shall be four "trustees" for this project.

• An individual technology leader with interest in fostering academic growth and development from the energy industry.

• An individual technology leader with interest in fostering academic growth and development from the water treatment industry.

• Nicholas Hall, representing a person with interest in fostering academic growth and development in the green energy, water treatment and emergency medical services industries.

• An academic fellow with a background in information technology and SMS-CB cell tower management.

• An academic fellow with a background in civil engineering, preferably electrical generation and water treatment plant management.

These four trustees will form the stakeholders that have the will have the final say on any dispute in the project.

Day to day operation of the project shall be conducted by all stakeholders. These stakeholders shall include the five trustees enumerated above and the students. 

The students shall be divided into three teams, each with 3-5 members, but totaling no less than 10 members. 

We shall now outline the student teams.

Software Team

• 2-3 senior student showing aptitude for C or C++, embedded device programming, and build management. Interest in inorganic chemistry preferred. TCP/IP or socket programming experience on a posix operating system a plus.

• 2-3 senior students showing aptitude for information technology, such as rackmounted server design, posix embedded operating system operation, deployment, cooling, maintenance and life cycle.

• A junior student showing an aptitude for quality assurance or traceability. Fine analytical skills and experience with test driven development are a must. C or C++ experience preferred.

• A documentation engineer willing to take responsibility for uniformity of documentation, proofreading and sound consistency of instructions, readability, communicability and viability of all documents produced.

Engineering Team

• 2-3 graduate students with interest in low-power liquid engineering applications and municipal engineering applications. An engineering student with experience or interest in building biofuel reactors, home water purifiers or treatment equipment may also be acceptable.

• 2-3 graduate electrical engineering students with experience using large capacitor circuits, solar panel based generation, and integrated circuit design. A graduate student with these research interests may also be acceptable. 

• 2-3 graduate telecommunications engineering student with experience in SMS-CB construction, FCC compliance and fault tolerance.

Administration Team:

• This shall consist of a single person from a business administration school or background or similar interest and Nicholas Hall.

All team members must attend the monthly stakeholder meeting at their academic institution, show up on time, and provide a summary of what they did that month. 

Nicholas Hall will try to do a weekly Skype chat with each member and shall consider unresponsiveness via email exceeding more than two weeks grounds for dismissal from the project.

Nicholas Hall will take a photograph of each stakeholder meeting and post it on this blog along with the minutes each time it is performed.

Primary User Story

"SUNBOX" 

Prototype for a modular solar powered generator, SMS CB antenna, datacenter and portable water treatment facility

This project is for a modular data center that runs off of solar power and powers a single cell broadcast antenna. 

• Nicholas Hall is a 30 year old venture capitalist and software engineer from Los Angeles, CA

• Nicholas Hall has been performing R&D on integrated data centers and power generation for several years alongside health research initiatives.

• This kickstarter project is for a single prototype that will integrate telemetry for this datacenter into a well-known telemetry standard used by the US military.

• GIT shall be used for all of its source control.

• The project should include broad representation from academia and industry and be organized into teams with clear responsibilities.

• We are looking for approximately 2 industry leaders willing to commit and 2 academic leaders willing to commit, and about 10-15 students, to be clarified with feedback.

• Each member should commit to contributing a certain amount of time. There will be a monthly stakeholder meeting at an academic institution and the project is expected to take approximately two semesters.

What We Need & What You Get

What we need:

• Two custom ISO containers, each about $2000.

• About $5,000 in gas hosing and liquid cooling equipment, including liquid coolant for cooling the datacenter ISO

• About $2,000 in rackmounted server equipment.

• About $3,000 for an antennae.

• About $10,000 in OEM solar generator equipment.

• About $6,000 to rent space to work on it. Alternatively, this may be donated.

• About $10,000 in water treatment and storage equipment for use in demonstrating acceptable pressure from the ISO containers water purifier.

What you get:

• Exclusive access to investment materials upon success.

• Day-by-day updates and documentation of our work, including pictures of the team and their participation.

• Free access to our mailing list, including periodic promotions such as free t-shirts and other swag.

• Your name as a contributor in our prototype development materials.

• Peace of mind working in a purely green solar electric project.

• Your picture on our blog.

• Your name as corporate sponsor, contributor or fellow.

Nicholas Hall will provide:

• Free secure hosting of all source code and design documents through a public GIT server at his own expense.

• Time administrating and coordinating.

• C++ unit tests

• Integrated circuit design acceptance criteria 

• Water pressure and quality design acceptance criteria

• A custom C++ build system,that uses only GNU make  and is suitable for targeting a number of embedded problems.

• IT expertise with the Linux operating system for embedded devices.

• Embedded expertise in low power ARM chipset and embedded device behavior with respect to the Linux operating system. Industry and academic participants may be free to choose another standard.

Industry shall provide:

• Criteria for a design document that adheres to biomedical device industry standards of traceability .

• Criteria for a design document that adheres to standards of Southern California Edison and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power energy production.

• Criteria for drinking water that adheres to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power tap water standards.

The students shall provide the following documents:

• 1 guide to constructing a datacenter contained in ISO container that runs on solar power and can output standard industrial voltages.

• 1 guide to constructing a water treatment apparatus contained in an ISO container that runs on standard industrial voltages.

• 1 guide to the software installation on both facilities.

The students shall provide the following source code deliverables:

• 1 deliverable consisting of water purifier embedded device source code, binary, GIT commit ID, accompanied by a document outlining the update procedure.

• 1 deliverable consisting of solar electrical generator device source code, binary, GIT Commit ID, accompanied by a document outlining the update procedure.

• 1 deliverable consisting of a rackmounted server physical dimensions and hardware specification, a document outlining its OS deployment procedure and setup. Alternatively, this document may be created by Nicholas Hall if no students are interested. 

• 1 deliverable consisting of a manual detailing how to maintain both ISO container devices and expected behavioral operation under basic malfunction and low sunlight conditions

All documents must be stored in GIT and all source-code must be stored in GIT. All sponsors and fellows will have read access to the source code repository. Source code ownership shall be determined by the stakeholders but is expected to be open source.

Nicholas Hall is expected to take full responsibility for the project and ensuring sufficient participation occurs to get it executed.

The Impact

You could change the world by giving it solar powered water filtration.

• This project intends to expand itself to ensure that its design is modular, so that other power generation sources can be quickly integrated such as wind, geothermal, nuclear, or even carbon. The design does not constrain this.

• Nicholas Hall is an activist for polio eradication and a volunteer public researcher for food safety disease control. He has anticipated such problems as the anthrax CDC incident and participated in activist journalism with regards to California's water shortage since 2011.

• This project intends to reach out to a nearby university or community college and industries and staff itself using a mixture of industry professionals and college students who show particular aptitude for bringing the project to its completion.

Risks & Challenges

• A low-power server rack that can still provide SMS text message service to be considered a viable alternative to a fossil fuel energy site is necessary. Voice capacity is not a requirement for this round, just SMS capability.

• It may be sufficient to simply demonstrate that the technology for this antenna can scale with more ISO containers, even if a single ISO container does not meet the same standard as municipal production. For this reason, design acceptance criteria should take into consideration that the containers may be used in tandem.

• Nicholas Hall is a hipster who listens to dubstep and is barely 30. He also has a B.S. in Information & Computer Science and has worked in industry as an engineer for approximately six years. He feels that presenting himself authentically is very important and encourages everybody else to do so as well. 

• This project should be approached with the academic, economic and humanitarian goals of everybody involved in mind.

• The first challenge will be creating a set of test criteria to ensure each milestone of the project is successful and that a testable design can be created.

• The goal of this project shall be to power a single SMS-CB tower. Cell broadcast towers fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC and are subject to regulation. 

• The team shall comply with all transparency and traceability regulations of a biomedical device such as a medical ventilator. Members representing industry will draft the documents and representatives from our academic institutions will be expected to implement them.

• Quality assurance shall be performed by industry leaders. We shall choose a local fossil fuel provider to set criteria based upon its power generation standards for fossil fuel. This is a difficult standard to achieve with solar and green generation but is within the scope of current technology. We will do the same for drinking water quality.

Other Ways You Can Help

Some people just can't contribute, but that doesn't mean they can't help:

• Please tell your friends about this project, and forward this to your community college or state college teacher.
• You can contribute space, code, servers and time to the project as an associate. 

Nicholas Hall is highly active on twitter at http://twitter.com/hallnicks

His life story can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pub/nicholas-hall/84/6b0/b53

He was born in Santa Cruz, CA near Monterey Bay.

That's all she wrote. Please keep watch here and have a good one.