Optical heart rate sensor
3-axis accelerometer/gyro
GPS
Ambient light sensor
Skin temperature sensor
UV sensor
Microphone
Haptic vibration motor
The 2 day battery life is the one turn off for me. Otherwise this is actually quite nice for $199 cross platform fitness wearable
Must say, looks very very alluring.
Edit:- Sizing:- http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/sizing
From the accessories it looks like it can be wirelessly charged, and has BLE:- http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/buy/productI...
Edit2:- Does not look like wireless charging. It is "Connector: Magnetically coupled connector to USB"
I'd really like to know. No matter what the answer is, it's going to be fascinating. Even if it's Windows but they've decided not to broadcast that.
Obviously not an official MS response!
We are using a single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs. We are completely non-blocking on all IO (including all sensors), and our CPU spends the majority of its time in a very low power mode. Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!
I cannot wait until people look at our battery size in mAh.
Sounds like Javascript to me, or maybe something like Erlang. I wonder if we'll be able to install apps on the device or just build external apps for cell phones. What about hooking it up to your desktop/laptop for notifications and stuff? I'm thinking there could be some cool features there.
I don't think this is enough info, even for an educated guess. What they're describing (single threaded/callbacks) could even be C/libevent, no?
Edit: Also,
> Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!
...for me, this rules out any kind of VM contained language
No comment on anything else mentioned:)
Congratulations for this btw. I'm not an MS fan, but I hope this works for you guys!
Our software was completely written from the ground up. We started with an empty main.c file. :)
A number of us lead software engineers are on hacker news and we all love the latest programming languages. We got a bunch of really super cool stuff in here, but all in straight C and running in very little memory space. We're dying to start an engineering blog, we believe some of the lessons we learned about applying modern software engineering techniques to an embedded device are very valuable. (Fun fact! Embedded Engineers have been avoiding dynamic allocation well before it was cool!)
We're hoping to get proper continuations in sometime soon. :) Our main problem is saving/restoring the stack without losing too much performance! (Cycles equal battery life, I cannot justify pushing for a move to continuations if the battery life hit is noticeable to the user!)
I hope you get your dev blog approved :)
Megabytes? That'd have been nice! :)
Thanks :)
I would guess C or C++ too.
add: and if they left JTAG/SWD pads exposed, then you could consider it “arduino on steroids” with some builtin sensors and GCC toolchain available ;)
For example, for Joe the jogger who wants to use it a purely health gadget companion, he may not want the microphone, UV sensor and ambient light sensor on, but for Jane the office worker who wants to take her steps around the office and have some office notification, the GPS and gyro is turned off. These two use cases could have vastly different battery life.
And I'd really like altimeter for this kind of device.
Don't your arguments (and app recommendations) point against a UV measure as being useful? If you want to know whether or not to put on sunscreen now, for a day out, knowing the current UV strength is no use since the conditions will be different later. That's where weather prediction comes in and makes your one little watchband UV datapoint useless. Looking up at the sky and observing weather conditions will always be better than that, and better weather prediction will beat looking up at the sky.
UV forecast graphs take some of the guesswork out of location and time, but I find that it hard to judge how much cloud cover is needed to drop from a high to a low index range. Sunscreen is great but it's not much fun to have to be covered in goop every day. Getting burnt when it's cloudy isn't much fun either. Knowing your exposure would limit the amount of cream.
UV levels can also be counter-intuitive, where the type/amount of cloud plays into how much is blocked, or where a partly cloudy sky actually increases UV levels. Or where, using my dumb experience as an example, you forget to consider that the spring sun in Florida is more powerful than the summer sun in the north.