this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Embedded portable device with a teeny ARM processor. Sadly, no room for linux anything or even an RTC. Every time it connected to a phone, the phone would set its clock so the timestamps were somewhat close to being accurate.
However, if you swapped out the AAA battery and DIDN'T connect it to the phone at least once, all your subsequent readings would go back to zero epoch and would be forgotten ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
Good times.
Some absolute and utter legend of a man made a Unix kernel for the fucking ZILOG Z80, you have no excuses
(It's called UZI and it's written in K&R C for some obscure CP/M compiler)
If it had been up to me, I would have included a proper real-time-clock in the design and done things a lot differently.
But the device was designed by one company and the BLE and processor module by another. For some ungodly reason neither trusted each other, so nobody was given access to the firmware source on either side. I worked for a third company that was their customer paying the bill. I was allowed to see the firmware for both sides, but only read only, on laptops provided by each company, one at a time, in a conference room with their own people watching everything. Yeah, it was strange.
I was there because the MCU and the BLE processor sometimes glitched and introduced random noise. Turned out the connection between the two parts were unshielded UART with no error detection/correction ๐คฆ๐ปโโ๏ธ
It was concidental that we hit the date glitch. Took all our effort just to get them to add a checksum and retry. The tiny MCU was maxed out of space. No way to fit in any more code for date math.
God I'm sorry you had to go through that much middle management bullshit
Thanks. On the plus side, I got to try 'soup dumpling' -- still the best I've ever had. And Kaoliang, the most gut-busting distilled beverage known to mankind. OTOH, the product shipped, won lots of awards, and got national coverage for the company.
Nothing to do with timezones, but still, fun times.