
Teardown of the Microsoft Band - schappim
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1681
======
at-fates-hands
I just got one of these and like a lot so far.

The only Achilles heel for this is getting the data out and doing some real
analysis of what your sleep cycles are, how your fitness levels trend, etc.

Hopefully in the near future, they will come out with something, but thus far,
the data you see is quite limited.

~~~
lazyjeff
I managed to extract the raw minute-by-minute data from the Band using some
hacky tricks. I was thinking of posting a howto, but trying to check if it
runs into problems with the CFAA/DMCA. Might post something tomorrow after
making sure it's legally sound.

~~~
lhl
I'm curious whether you decoded the binary protocol/blob or have just been
poking at the API (where just about everything is pretty convenient JSON).
I've done the latter but haven't broken out my Ubertooth yet for the former.

Re: DMCA - there's a reverse engineering carve-out for interoperability. While
I guess MS could abuse either CFAA/DMCA to slap down RE, it seems like it'd be
a pretty bad PR move.

~~~
lazyjeff
I think what I was doing is the latter. Anyways, I just posted the writeup if
you want to swap notes.

~~~
lhl
A lot of my notes aren't super well organized (and wouldn't make sense w/o
scrubbed captured flows) but I just posted a comment on your post thread
talking about the BTLE as well as the remote API stuff.

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Animats
Do not remove the Loyalty Bracelet.

[http://www.yuwanmei.com/products#4](http://www.yuwanmei.com/products#4)

~~~
blinduck
Wow, is this site an actual business or some kind of parody?

~~~
Animats
That site is run by The Onion, which, for a few weeks, claimed to have been
bought out by Yu Wan Mei Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation.

 _Any time is Fish Time!_

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didgeoridoo
Anyone else have trouble not automatically translating "LiPo" battery as
"Lithium/Polonium" in their heads?

That would be a bad battery.

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tdicola
Interesting to see a Cortex-M4 on board, certainly no way it's running
Windows. Maybe they have some simple RTOS?

~~~
kabdib
Not really an RTOS. I hear it's more an "event loop and some interrupt
handlers," much like the firmware in the Kinect.

(We went through a "we need an RTOS" phase on the Kinect. Eventually we
ditched the thread stuff we wrote, which made things a _lot_ simpler -- if you
don't absolutely have to have threads and can get away with computing stuff in
a main loop, then _do that_. Threads introduce all kinds of synchronization
and inconsistent execution time nonsense that you should avoid if you can).

~~~
Marcus10110
fascinating. I assume that was the first kinect. Was the vision processing
separated from the USB interface in different chips? Sounds like a fun
project.

~~~
kabdib
The 1.0 Kinect is several processors:

\- A "DSP" based camera system that just does transfers from the sensor system
to USB, and that does some other monitoring and housekeeping. It does no
vision processing, it's just pass-through of video from the chips to the host.

\- An ARM-based audio system that handles mic data, runs an echo cancelation
algorithm against host-provided speaker data, and provides the raw and echo-
canceled mic data to the host.

Early Kinect versions used yet another processor for managing the tilt motor
and accelerometer. This stuff was move to the ARM later (that a tilt-motor
processor existed in year 1 units is a fine example of team structure
affecting product structure).

All of these CPUs have their own USB interfaces, and there's an internal USB
hub so there's only one wire going to the host. :-)

None of these chips use an RTOS; that would just get in the way.

The vision processing is done on the host, where you have heavy lifting
capability with GPUs and tons of memory and so on. Doing that processing on
the camera would quite expensive in terms of hardware and power, and wouldn't
be able to adapt as well to new algorithms.

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rasz_pl
-failed to remove qrcode sticker from big chip?

-failed to identify gyro/accelerometer/compass chips

ifixit they are not, but its a good start

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userbinator
For comparison, the Nike+ FuelBand teardown:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xdajSS_cOU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xdajSS_cOU)

(Warning: very lengthy and detailed, contains some humour.)

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minthd
It seems like some components are missing, for example the gps and and
microphone.

