qupada

While I have a personal general rule against backing electronics on Kickstarter and would likely wait for it to be available at retail, I wouldn’t necessarily immediately discount this one.

It’s probably worth noting - mentioned in Jeff Geerling’s video - they had a MOQ of 1500 on the metal case, which likely forced them to be significantly further through the process than a lot of Kickstarters are at launch.

Indeed, you will note that they carefully chose the moniker “Daily Active Uniques” and not “Daily Active Users”.

I think that speaks volumes, as humans are definitely harder to retain.

Can also recomment “Sqwincher” (stupid name aside) products.

https://www.sqwincher.com/products/single-serve-qwik-stik-zero/

As they market primarily to people working in construction / other trades - and are therefore sold at the likes of electrical and safety supply stores - we buy them in bulk for when we’re spending weeks installing racks of servers in our datacentre at work.

it’s essentially 2 PCI Express x1 lanes and USB 2.0

Sometimes there’s only a single PCIe lane though. And as you say, that’s not a x2 but explicitly two x1s.

No WiFi card needs the bandwidth (yet), at PCIe 3 speeds you’ve got around 7.8Gbps for a x1, and PCIe 4 double that.

The Coral comes in a “dual” version for exactly this reason (https://coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-dual-edgetpu/) you just have to be very sure the slot you’re putting it in is actually delivering two PCIe connections.

Also for bonus fun, most WiFi/BT cards use the PCIe interface for the WiFi and USB for the Bluetooth.

It sounds like you’re thinking of LoRa, another 900MHz radio protocol.

LoRa has similar bandwidth to Zigbee (125kbps), and as you say is designed for low-power devices running on battery. I have PIR motion sensors at home which have used only around a third of their battery after 2 years.

Security cameras seems to be a large target market for HaLow though, where you need a couple of megabits at a few hundred metres.

My last laptop (owned from 2013-2020) had an NFC reader under the touchpad.

I managed - exactly once - to get my phone to send a file to it using Beam. Did everything exactly as expected; initiated the transfer by NFC and sent the file over Bluetooth.

I could never repeat the experiment. Once, and only once.