Samsung's Smart Watch Commercial Pays Homage to Early Apple iPhone Ad

[hchung]

They did come out with a the 'iwatch' first. In addition, their TV interface seems to be very interesting. It surprises me that, Apple, who, leads and rarely follows will, with the watch and TV, in fact, be following.

No. It's certainly not a first.

Seiko, Fossil, Sony, even Microsoft sold smartwatches for each decade of computing already.

It's funny how everybody here's talked about the Gear not being able to handle most notifications, not being able to work with Android phones in general, Samsung copies etc., and yet nobody really brings up this:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/19/2876341/sony-smartwatch-review

Want notifications, a 3 day battery life, and compatibility with existing Android phones? Go Sony. (well, don't get that one I linked to, a Smartwatch 2 was just released to replace it)

 

[hchung]

The "M7" (named to go with the A7) is actually labeled as an NXP LPC18A1.

It's a made-to-order version of an NXP(*) LPC1800 series, which is an MCU that already comes in about 40 different pre-designed variations... each with various amounts of Flash, RAM and types of I/O.

View attachment 439302

Apple would've asked NXP to include the particular I/O blocks that they wanted, and NXP would then have designed and produced it.

In this case, the blocks would've been in part determined by what the sensors needed. Let's look.

• The 5S uses an AK8963 compass chip. Looking at its specs, we see that it requires either an I2C or SPI interface.
  
• The STMicroelectronics gyroscope L3G4200DH has the same interface choices.
  
• The Bosch Sensortec accelerometer BMA220 ... checking... yep, ditto.

So Apple needed at least three I2C and/or SPI ports on the "M7" to talk to those sensors.

(*) NXP used to be Philips Semiconductor

Yep, definitely a custom LPC1800.

Though, not really sure if a custom I/O block set is necessary. If the addresses don't conflict, all three sensors could be driven by one I2C port. All the ones in the quick reference come with 2 I2C and 2 SPI, so it seems even if they did one sensor per port, the existing config would work.

Maybe least number of GPIO to save footprint space, but max out Flash and RAM? Thoughts?

 

[kdarling]

Yep, definitely a custom LPC1800.

Though, not really sure if a custom I/O block set is necessary. If the addresses don't conflict, all three sensors could be driven by one I2C port.

Thank you for being kind to someone who hasn't designed serial networks in a while

(My last big multi-device serial project was SDLC over RS-485! However I do - or did - know more than a bit about I2C and USB etc - sigh)

Of course you're right, and sure enough, the I2C addresses do not conflict.

Maybe least number of GPIO to save footprint space, but max out Flash and RAM? Thoughts?

Hmm. If I were Apple, I'd be thinking about off-loading more and more to this low power device.

For example, they did submit a patent on low power facial recognition not long ago, that was pretty cool. Basically all the low power CPU has to do, is take a lo-res camera image every few seconds to watch for a patch of orange (apparently humans are not black, white, pink, yellow... but actually various shades of orange!) and then wake up the main CPU to do more power hungry checks for a known face. The orange watch is something this MCU could do.

I think they'd also want to do like Moto and Samsung, and watch for various shakes and gestures to be used to wake up into a camera or phone or whatever mode.

So I'm with you. The more RAM and Flash, the better for handling more tasks.

 

[hchung]

Thank you for being kind to someone who hasn't designed serial networks in a while

(My last big multi-device serial project was SDLC over RS-485! However I do - or did - know more than a bit about I2C and USB etc - sigh)

Of course you're right, and sure enough, the I2C addresses do not conflict.

We're all human. And if it's been a while, it's bound to be hazy. I'm still wondering why SPI shows up in System Profiler on new Macs. There's plenty for me to learn too.

Hmm. If I were Apple, I'd be thinking about off-loading more and more to this low power device.

For example, they did submit a patent on low power facial recognition not long ago, that was pretty cool. Basically all the low power CPU has to do, is take a lo-res camera image every few seconds to watch for a patch of orange (apparently humans are not black, white, pink, yellow... but actually various shades of orange!) and then wake up the main CPU to do more power hungry checks for a known face. The orange watch is something this MCU could do.

I think they'd also want to do like Moto and Samsung, and watch for various shakes and gestures to be used to wake up into a camera or phone or whatever mode.

So I'm with you. The more RAM and Flash, the better for handling more tasks.

Totally agree; With the maturity of smartphones, we'll probably see more of things like this. Just, not sure what I'd throw in as a feature request