https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/make-mintronics-blink...
It seems to be based on the Blinky POV:
https://www.wayneandlayne.com/projects/blinky/
A similar idea (transferring data via computer screen) goes back to 1994's Timex Datalink:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
1 https://makezine.com/article/technology/in-the-maker-shed-mi...
This is especially important for consumer devices like badges. Anyone can find a device with screen that can run a webpage, but very very few people would have a right programmer with right pogo pins.
Plus, pogo pins at less than .100" spacing are pretty fragile, and the projects author uses are so small they'll need a much finer pitch.
Then the illumination on your LED will affect the phase of the oscillator. By trying to make it oscillate at ~10Mhz, and then sampling the data, you should avoid the clipping problem, and you'd have a lot more data to use to potentially extract interesting things with clever math.
Even if the oscillator runs at 10Mhz, you don't have to sample at 10 Mhz - you could sample at a lower frequency (which must be clock cycle accurate) and make use of aliasing to still measure phase shifts very accurately.
You're totally going to measure the power supply, temperature, radio signals and a whole host of other things at the same time, but with the right signal processing/modulation you should be able to extract the effects you need.
Good suggestion but from their article it seems like there's some really odd silicon level interactions going on so who knows? Might be worth getting a CH32v003 and finding out!
When I set out to do this I was expecting to make a new version of the badge with a different circuit originally I had to add a bunch of components just to make the amplifier work. But, I just kept optimizing and whittling it down and eventually ended up back with the original circuit. This badge is the same one I showed off six months ago. It’s unmodified there are no hardware changes at all. So in a sense, the ability to do wireless updates was there all along – we just had to unlock it, by thinking really hard about the problem.
