I think most of the battery life improvement is the much more power-efficient SOCs available. The original Pebble used an STM32 processor and a TI Bluetooth chip, where nowadays having BLE integrated into the SOC is table stakes.
Did you get it in black like I did? My buttons also cracked practically right away (within a day), I suspect because the reinforcements were installed poorly (the buttons are VERY hard to press). It made the down button unusable.
But kudos to Eric and Claudio, they're shipping me a replacement (in white, which, as I understand it and as they said in their email, should be less susceptible to the issue, something about the white rubber versus black makes it less problematic). My only frustration was how quickly it failed, since I know it's a new-old-stock case.
Highly looking forward to the Time 2. I only stopped using my Pebble Time Steel when the battery life degraded to ~3 days (after about 6 years), used a Fossil Hybrid for a few years, now a Pixel watch. Measuring battery life in weeks will be a breath of fresh air :)
> Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer.
Technically Zigbee _also_ defines an API layer -- the Zigbee Cluster Library, or ZCL -- but that's more like an opt-in standard you _could_ implement, rather than any hard requirement. And no surprise, the Matter Cluster Library Specification, being authored by the same CSA that made ZCL, is eerily similar to ZCL...
But as I understand it, you're right that Matter is essentially "hey everyone, let's _actually_ standardize around a common application layer". It isn't technologically revolutionary (the building blocks have been around for more than a decade), but it's a better packaging of it all.
Source: My employer has been involved with Zigbee and other low-power network technologies for a long time.
Assuming you have an ability to run your whole bare-metal application in a simulated/"dev" environment. Not everyone has that luxury. That becomes much easier if the micro you're targeting has support of some kind in say QEMU, but those are fairly few and far between.
The way I interpreted that point is basically "if you don't think the tool/language/library you're using sucks in some way, you're not using it enough". As in, "opinionated" here doesn't mean "you should use this, everything else sucks" (which is what opinionated usually means in software contexts), it means you have opinions about these things that are founded in experience, not impressions. In that light, you ARE opinionated.
For instance, I am opinionated... but I keep my opinions to my own (e.g., personal projects). When working with others I'm less likely to be like that because, well, everything is more subjective than it seems. From my point of view, there is nothing more junior than being fixated with the idea that tool X is the only tool for job Y.
Various MicroPython implementations, specifically the STM32 port (which runs the PyBoard), expose their filesystem as a USB mass storage device that you can copy files into directly. So I wouldn't say that it's exclusive to CircuitPython by any stretch.
In the US, at least the 433 and 915 MHz, and of course 2.4 GHz, bands are unlicensed and widely used by all sorts of commercial, industrial, and DIY electronics. All my wireless temperature sensors in my house are on the 433 MHz band, my natural gas meter speaks (ERT) on 915...
MicroPython isn't really an alternative implementation of Python so much as it is an embedded scripting language that looks pretty much identical to normal Python.
Unless you specifically are after a barometer, in which case I don't think the PT2 has that.
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