
Man discovers medical device uses a Game Boy display - okket
https://twitter.com/i/moments/910876766096560128
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kiddico
It blows my mind that this is what the company ended up using... Why? Normally
the price is the factor that chooses what part is used in a system. Surely it
would be cheaper to use literally any regular screen than to retrofit a
Gameboy SP topcase into your design...

Maybe one of the devs used a gameboy screen to develop on personally, and made
a prototype of the product using the knowledge he already had using the
gameboy. As a deadline approached and they ran the numbers comparing
development cost of a new display system vs sourcing tons of gameboy screens,
and gameboy screen sourcing came out cheaper with their predicted number of
orders. Or maybe a dev thought it would be funny, I don't know man.

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mikejmoffitt
They didn't just take a game boy screen, this is the whole thing.

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kiddico
oh, you're right! That...makes even less sense.

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NonEUCitizen
It makes even more sense. Keeps NRE costs down.

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MattPearce
Someone on Twitter found a presentation detailing the design of this device
[https://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmconrad/ECGR6185-2013-01/Present...](https://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmconrad/ECGR6185-2013-01/Presentations/Chitale_Paper_Presentation.pdf)

> GBA Display used has small size and light weight... GBA Gaming displays have
> excellent graphics processing capability for plotting... The proposed system
> has relatively lower cost

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joshumax
This is insane! They even hooked the ECG measurement circuits to the Gameboy
via the flash cart!

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mikejmoffitt
This is not just the game boy screen, this is the entire GBA as a controller,
with custom hardware in the cartridge slot. The GBA is a great embedded
system. More power to them!

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mrguyorama
Right, with thorough documentation, a large deployment of users/testers, and a
good bit of power, the largest downside to using a Gameboy as the soul of your
product is price.

I guess this means price point was not a concern of this product

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jsjohnst
I have to think the margin on medical devices is big enough to warrant
potentially losing a few bucks on OTS components.

