We're proud to formally introduce Northstar Version 1, a magnet activated, LED-equipped silicon device from
Grindhouse Wetware, implanted today in synchronous procedures at
NRW Forum in Düsseldorf, Germany and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Follow us to stay tuned for videos of the implantation and information on pre-orders, coming soon!
Comments
Something else to consider... there is sure to be some interesting backlash towards the community on this. I think we all need to stand together as advocates. At some point, someone is going to notice what we're doing bringing in things like regulation etc.
I would also say the fact that it does nothing will go farther towards acceptance. People will be quicker to accept a fashion accessory than an RFID, (I've seen enough "GOV TRACK THROUGH SAT-CHIPS?!?!?" threads on those), and it's visually interesting enough to make a buzz.
@glims it's coated in 0.125mm parylene-c, under 1mm silicone.
I could see lights like these getting to be very popular once the induction charging is going strong.
http://www.kiscoparylene.com/ is a small and agreeable example. They will coat your stuff, no questions asked. minimum order is usually around $1k.
@Meanderpaul it's only available in a circle, but we are talking to some folks who want to place that circle inside larger silicone forms, any shape you like. the two silicone layers will provide great mechanical resilience.
@ElectricFeel the QFP is an ATMega328-P. it's overkill for this design, but friendly and low-power. We use PWM to make the lights more efficient. This would be difficult to achieve without a controller. If we were going for sheer simplicity, we could have made the device much smaller (and we might, in the future. LED in an RFID tube, anyone?), but we also wanted to see how devices of this size interact with the body. We knew that northstar V2 would be around this size long before we completed V1.
@BodyHackingCon thanks! you won't have to wait long. we've got wireless power up and running in the lab, and we'll make our designs available to everyone when we're ready to go commercial. (Our Qi charger can fit on the back of a penny, with room to spare.)
The biggest difficulty with this project wasn't electrical design so much as learning to work with other companies, and the ins and outs of mass production. Our first attempt at a parylene coating run ended up destroying 50 northstar units. That would have been a very expensive mistake if we'd been using complex hardware.
@ChilliEye they are 6.5mm thick.
Me wanty
What the heck do you do for a living? I ask because you seem to have a lot of free time....
If the credit card supercap is this one, it's not thinner than a creditcard, it appears to be several times thicker. It just has a slightly smaller outline. With a capacity of 2000F and an assumed voltage of 2.7V, that's 7290J of energy. Compare that to this lipo, which is 2cm shorter than a credit card, but otherwise similar to the one he displays in terms of thickness, and the amount of energy it stores : 26690J. It's not even close.
For reference, the volume of an ISO standard credit card with a thickness of 1mm is 4.62cm3
An off the shelf lipo battery like this one is pretty tiny, 110mAh at 3.7V which works out to around 1465.2J in 1.92cm3 (less than half the volume of a credit card)
An equivalent capacitor needs to be 402F, assuming a working voltage of 2.7V. Can you make acap that small?
Two other points; unless you can get a capacitor that operates at or above 3.7V, you can pretty much write off using a simple MCU with your implant. It's just not feasible to add a boost regulator to an implant. Secondly, an overvolted supercap will breakdown and emit gasses much like any other power storage medium, although less violently than a lipo.