joey castillo

See also: the Stockdale paradox. We’re not getting out by Christmas. www.jimcollins.com/media_topics...

To be clear I’m not saying you shouldn’t fight. I’m not giving up. I’m just accepting the reality that the fight is not for things to get better, because on the timescales we’re talking about — decades at least — it won’t, and if you hoped for that, you’d lose to despair. The fight is to endure.

Not exactly; I’m just liberating myself from hope. If you fight in the belief that things might get better, you’ll lose hope when they don’t. In embracing the reality — that it only gets worse from here — I’m allowing myself to enjoy these good years, and preparing to endure the harder ones to come.

The story of our time is this: the bad guys win, and it's not even close. Remember the whole "It gets better" campaign? That was wishful thinking: a hope, not a promise.

It Does Not Get Better. YOU get better at handling the bad thing. The sooner you embrace this reality, the better off you'll be.

I’m mostly thinking speed over $, like how long will my prototypes take to clear a queue of 100,000 Temu packages? Vs how long will it take an expensive US board house to fab a nonstandard stackup? 1 week, like before? lol. It’s gonna get harder to move fast and innovate. Only in the US, of course 🫠

Trump's Canada, Mexico, China tariffs suspend loophole behind fentanyl shipments President Donald Trump's new tariff orders against Canada, Mexico and China all contain clauses suspending a duty-free exemption for low-value shipments below $800 that is widely seen as a loophole that has allowed shipments of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals into the United States.

Well folks: I think the party may be over when it comes to quick-turn circuit board fun. “For avoidance of doubt, duty-free de minimis treatment under 19 U.S.C. 1321 shall not be available… on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern time on February 4, 2025.” www.reuters.com/world/trumps...

Rendering of a green circuit board, “Sensor Watch Pro Tester”, with a detailed bill of materials stenciled on to the silkscreen.

when it comes time to assemble this thing, future-joey owes me a beer for being so thoughtful

this reminds me of a comment from a friend who used to work in the same building as Goldman Sachs, and would post things he overheard in the elevator:
“How’s it going?”
“You know. Market goes up. Market goes down. We make money.”

wait so you’re telling me the NFC championship game is sponsored by TurboTax… and the AFC championship game is also sponsored by TurboTax… which means that no matter who loses, TurboTax wins? Again: this feels very on the nose.

a post by matthew chapman reading, "under trump's executive order, every single person in america is now legally classified as female. all embryos begin by developing female sex organs, with male sex organs only replacing them at around 6 weeks of gestation", with an infix screenshot of the pertinent EO. then a reply by cullen crawford, "lets go girls"

Ladies and also ladies, I have good news…

God grant me the courage to change
the things that I can change,
and the serenity to accept
that the things that I cannot
will require more effort.

Graph of two days and nights of data: stationary minutes, orientation changes and wrist temperature. Two periods of sleep and three off-wrist events are annotated.

Solving a Sensor Watch motion problem: sleep looks like long periods w/o motion, but so does taking off the watch. By adding one more signal to the mix, I think we've got it: a long stationary period generally means sleep, unless accompanied by a rapid temperature drop. Then it's an off-wrist event.

A graph plotting orange areas and blue areas from November 18 to 24. Clear blue peaks happen overnight, with variable levels of orange in between.

Last week I finished my final code for the Sensor Watch accelerometer. Just plotted the data I gathered at 5 minute intervals — orange represents orientation change events, and blue represents minutes without any motion at all — and I'll be damned if that doesn't look like sleep & activity tracking.

Macro photo of the “Sensor Watch Accelerometer” board.

Samples of a last-minute change to the accelerometer board arrived last week. Been wearing it ever since; seems all good! This morning I finished a self-test procedure that lets me quickly validate all the functionality of manufactured boards, and just like that, an order for 2000 more is in flight.

Photo: the back side of an Arduino Mega board. Written in trembling Sharpie at the bottom left: “Cursed” in all caps.

found while digging around for an Arduino. This is not my handwriting.

Need a distraction from Election Day jitters? At 2:00 EST (11:00 PST) join me and Alex Glow for a Hackster Café livestream! We'll be talking Sensor Watch Pro, my new, MORE hackable board swap for the Casio F-91W that's on Crowd Supply now. That's in 2 hours; set a timer! https://youtu.be/G85LlKGHFdc

Close-up of an illustration on the back, showing the layout of a 7-segment digit.

The back side of the object with documentation on how to use it.

Photo of a small gadget with a screen. Text on the gadget reads “Sensor Watch” in quotes.

I will be bringing a couple dozen of these with me to Hackaday Supercon. The "Sensor Watch" SAO is not Sensor Watch — hence the quotes — but it is an I²C segment LCD driver that's easy to control with MicroPython. To get folks started, I have once again put copious documentation on the back side :)

…and for Patreon subscribers, today was a twofer: for business-tier patrons, a dive into Oddly Specific Objects' Q3 financials: https://www.patreon.com/posts/114640593 and for everyone else, mechanical drawings of the custom spring connector we're having made: https://www.patreon.com/posts/114641633

For this week's Sensor Watch Pro backer update, I wrote about the new accelerometer sensor add-on, and how I'm using it for sleep and activity tracking: https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-watch-pro/updates/sleep-tracking-with-sensor-watch-pro-and-the-accelerometer-add-on

Life Pro Tip: How to install a package using homebrew:

brew install package
[Ctrl] + C
HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install package

Photo of a notepad page tracking accelerometer data next to an Oura screenshot of sleep data.

Last night I finished a sleep tracking proof of concept for Sensor Watch Pro: it counts orientation changes & motion events per hour. Adds 600 nA to the power budget. Sensor Watch data at left; Oura data at right. Note the period of Deep Sleep, and that period of low motion counts from 1:00-3:00 AM…

If you’re working with low power stuff I’d say it’s the best bang per unit buck of almost anything on the workbench! Reliably measures current consumption down to the nanoampere range; I’m using it to test accelerometer modes, tease out when it’s drawing 1.25 µA vs 0.6 µA.

Photo of a small round circuit board titled “Sensor Watch Pro”

see, if I were cleverer I would have used my return-from-the-void post to share an actual photo of Sensor Watch Pro, and mention that it's live on Crowd Supply. But hey: better late than never. www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specif...

Photo of a breadboarded gadget plugged into a Nordic Power Profiler.

Testing, testing: is this working? I'm going to try to be active on all the non-Twitter socials, thanks to an app that lets me cross-post stuff. Anyway here's a gadget: today's work power profiling Sensor Watch Pro's new accelerometer add-on.

I could have sworn I posted something here once before!