[dotancohen]

This does look like a great project for in-the-field devices. Especially in literal fields where power is hard to come by.

But I see no mention of atomic operations, which would be critical in such a device. Even the trivial action of associating a timestamp with a sensor measurement would require an atomic method.

Sure, one could take the timestamp before and after a method runs and reject it if the stamps surpass some delta. But then this is no longer a "your code doesn't know about it" solution, as they advertise.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

The use case is a low-power device that does not use batteries but can store energy, and runs at a low and potentially-unknown duty cycle, either has no actuators, or has actuators that have a stable latching state and where the actuator remaining latched does not present a safety or operational problem.

I think that describes the use case, but besides a simple datalogger, I'm not coming up with examples of where this would be useful.

[jhgb]

> Especially in literal fields where power is hard to come by.

Is it really? A square centimeter of a photovoltaic surface should provide you with at least a milliwatt of power on average. Thas's not to be scoffed at IMO.

[dotancohen]

The device might see that milliwatt for two minutes twice a week during winter in some locations. Planning in the field devices means planning for the worst case scenarios, not the common scenarios.

[jhgb]

A square centimeter is a very small surface, though. Scaling it up for the worst case is hardly a problem. The board in the picture has dozens of square centimeters on its own, so wherever that board can be used, clearly a much larger PV area can be used as well.