No, but it’s good marketing. Nothing wrong with that.
Funny story: At the end of the 19th century Great Britain pushed for all products to be branded with their country of origin, not to market their products better but for protectionism – to make it easier for customers to recognize real or perceived knock-offs.
That works if those other countries really make inferior products but it backfires when other countries make products of equal or better quality. “Made in Germany” (for example) then becomes a mark of quality, not inferiority.
These days a lot of it is due to localism. A lot of people would rather avoid buying stuff that's already circumnavigated the globe three times before it reaches them.
It applies more to food I guess, but the principle is the same.
The customers win, either way. They are informed and have a choice. It's not only quality, its also supporting the national economy. E.g. you might buy a made in Germany washer, or you might buy a made in US one, to support local economy and to prevent the outflow of money, even thou it is of lower quality (I'm not saying that it really is).
Yes, that was normal in Italy too during fascism. Protectionism has always been a great popularistic argument and that's why I am surprised to see it on a geeky product like that. One would think that the user of battery powered cufflinks wouldn't care about that.
I'm not sure why you think geeks unilaterally oppose protectionism (or that we'd even call it protectionism). Seems like a broad, inaccurate generalization.
Personally, I like keeping money in the local economy when it makes sense to.
Because hackers are usually curious people, with many interests; chances are they study some economics and found that this kind of 'protectionism' doesn't make much sense.
But yes, you're right, it's quite an assumption. On a parallel (OT) note, I have no idea whether there is a political bias amongst geeks. I've read some pool from NSF a few years ago and it was quite impressive how scientists tend to be left wing/liberal, why engineers tend to be right wing/conservative. So politically speaking there's probably two kinds of geeks but how about two kind of hackers?
A lot of products state that they're "Made in [Europe or UK]", but they are actually manufactured in some Eastern country (most frequently China, Taiwan or Malaysia). Still, the mark is not a lie, as the product was engineered/designed in named country (but manufactured in another).
I suspect the waveform is so non-sinusoidal because the eye is approximately log-sensitive. So if you want something to look sinusoidal, you should really physically output exp(sin(w*t)+c), which looks approximately like the output on the scope.
A couple years ago someone asked me to build him a product that would simulate sunrise: basically just gradually fade up a few high-power LEDs. The only thing I found that worked was a very gradual logarithmic-type fade. Even so, I had to prolong the curve at the low end. It turns out that human vision can detect small changes at low light levels, but at high brightness it takes a big step change to register.
Probably old-hat to trained lighting engineers, but I learned a lot doing such a seemingly simple project.
IANAL, but the patent, as I read it, if for a "A sleep mode indicator apparatus for a laptop computer, said apparatus indicating to users that said laptop computer being in sleep mode" or "A status indicator apparatus for an electronic device, said apparatus indicating to users of said computer a certain status". Since the cuff links doesn't communicate any kind of state, I don't think the patent applied. Copyright for the design sounds more plausible, as they're clearly designed to look like something from a Mac.
If you're doing simple digital work, you can get a hell of a lot of functionality for a lot less.
I'm a huge fan of the Saleae Logic (http://www.saleae.com/logic). It does 8 lines of digital scoping @ 24 Mhz PLUS protocol decoding (I2C/SPI/CAN/Serial) for under $150. That's 5% of the cost of a Tek or Agilent scope. And the GUI is lightyears better than those other companies.
Looks very nice, and seems made by people smart enough to make the software multi-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) and ship to (most of) Europe without customs hassles.
Haven't fiddled with hardware lately, but I'm tempted to get one for old times sake (today came across the logic probe I made with a LED, resistor, plastic pen and sewing needle back in my student days ;-).
In addition to the existing 8 25MHz channels on the Logic, it adds two channels that can go up to a 100MHz and 4 channels up to 50MHz. At $300, it remains quite a steal.
I just used one of the Saleae instruments for the first time the other week (I'd had my eye on them for quite a while before that) and it's great. Personally I sometimes want to look at analog signals, or signals that are a bit faster than what the Saleae can handle, so for me it is more of a complement to a scope (which I do already own) but for people with slightly different needs I can easily see how it could handle most everything they might otherwise use a scope for.
Or the digital way: on the Commodore 64 disk drive (the 1541), you'd flip a bit of a certain memory-mapped location to switch the LED on or off. Doing this a variable amount of times per second would result in a smoothly fading led. Not sure if anyone ever made a sinusoidal fade, but there were demo's with the LED following the beat of the music.
Pulse width modulation (PWM) is a pretty common technique. This article seems to be more about measuring the actual waveform Apple uses. It even says that the PWM used in the original introduced artifacts into the measured waveform.
I saw someone do exactly this with a 1541 at a party in the summer of 1990: up, down, up, down. It didn't quite do Apple's special rhythm, naturally, but it was quite a shock the first time I saw it.
LEDs also don't change brightness with voltage, they do with amperage and usually have an optimal amperage for the LED's design. Brightness can be controlled many ways, the most common way is to use Pulse Width Modulation. It's also a common power saving technique.
Yeah, it's not necessarily to perfectly reconstruct the LED's signal, only the average amplitude over a relatively long period of time. Like, just sample the color of a certain pixel on each frame.
But you could just map the current-to-brightness curve of your own LED and reconstruct the necessary PWM signal using that. Actually that'd be a good way to go anyway, since that curve may differ from the one on Apple's LED.
Generating a PWM signal based on a particular LED's characteristics is similar to designing the gain of an amplifier circuit around a particular BJT's beta. It's just not done. That's also the whole reason behind controlling LED brightness through PWM. By PWMing the drive current, you can ensure that the LED is being driven far into its conducting region, and therefore not relying on controlling dimness by varying current around the LED's "knee" (which literally is different for just about every LED in existence, even same part numbers). This way you also avoid other stuff like wavelength shifts that tend to occur near the knee.
http://www.adafruit.com/icufflinks
Quite appealing if you ask me, if a bit bulky for cufflinks :)