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by iamnotlarry 3121 days ago
"Without electronics" except for the computer devices that have to be dedicated to monitoring for the back-scatter created by the 3-D printed objects and translate it into something meaningful.
1 comments

"Dedicated"? Can't the devices that is already nearby, like a router or your smartphone, query it when needed?
They can't query it, they have to be listening when it broadcasts.
Yeah ok I understand that it doesn't have a memory. But you can still sort of "query" the current state of a device that is always broadcasting, like a flow or speed sensor.
The router's probably pinging beacon frames out several times a second anyway. There's a lot of 2.4GHz traffic a passive listener could use.
You could presumably use existing devices for that, but it would require making a serious software change - in particular, you'd have to alter the radio driver to listen to and recognize backscattered signals (instead of rejecting them as noise).