I saw a lot of this splicing type in old military radio transceivers ("portable" for a given value of portable - usually some kind of backpack weighting ~30Kg - and the batteries were in another backpack).
That splicing works for solid-core conductors, but it doesn't have the same strength on stranded wire, as it is more flexible. It could work on tinned thin stranded wire (as it makes a kindof-solid wire) but if you tin it then you can just solder it and that's it. The referenced standard[1] also contains the splicing for stranded wire, and some requirements about when and how to use each.
If you haven't noticed already, you are now aware that the two intertwined wires in the second and third section of that illustration is topologically impossible.
It's a pretty darn good technique though, useful when your wire harness is going through some minor tension. Extensively used during our underwater robot build :)
I don't really see a use for this but I agree with your ending point about computers being snuck into all sorts of things for little or no cost is very exciting.
I briefly plugged it in to an Android to check the cable worked. lsusb detected it, but I didn't have a chance to test any games directly on the phone.
I wonder what the latency is on the new chromecasts. I've heard it's about 10ms (just for display) but it would be worth testing with a stop watch app.
Wow, what a great post! This is just incredible. It makes you realize how much the world has changed and how much more change we're going to see in the near future. Props to you, Terence.
I somehow managed to miss the sentence entirely where this is explained (it is used for reading EDID from a connected display). Thanks for the correction!
An on-board battery or capacitor could help to smooth out brief high power tasks, but I don't think it will be able to sustain video decoding & playback at a constant supply of 150mA. I'm really excited for that to be a possibility though, so I hope I'm wrong.
Of course, some TVs might dump a lot more current over the connection, just like what was common with USB 2.0 going well over 500mA.
I've never seen any Chromecast advertising that implies it only gets power over HDMI. All of the media on Google's Chromecast site show either both HDMI/Aux and USB plugged in or nothing plugged in. Pretty much any TV now has a USB port whether it be for media playback or for updating the firmware of the TV on older ones so its not a huge deal to have to plug it.
All of the screenshots I saw before purchasing the original device clearly showed it plugged into a TV with no power cord attached. It looks like they may have fixed it in the newer marketing.
