You may well not be doing it all the time, but on the occasions you do need it, it's quite likely you will be doing multiple logging sessions, looking at results, doing another session etc., so having to swap the card could be a bit of a pain. Apart from safety, is there any ergonomic downside to running ith the cover off ? Are the screws self-tap or in inserts ?
I'm not familiar with the limitations of BLE - maybe instead of downloading the whole, log, some way of browsing it over BLE might be useful as you are often looking for particular events or at a particular time.
He said metal-threaded inserts. If they are not captive, probably worth putting some small o-rings or similar on them so they don't get lost.
Downloading logs over BLE is certainly possible, just going to be a lot of effort firmware wise. I have a months worth of data logged here thats 16MB. So a day would be much less than 500kB. At 5-10kB/s transfer rate (possible with android but not IOS), it would take ~1min to transfer.
If you are doing multiple sessions, probably worth purchasing another tool (or trying the wifi SD posted, that was a good idea). But certainly there is a small market opportunity here for dave or the manufacturer to replace the BLE module with an ESP32 (was discussed before), and maybe a dot matrix display, cost could double.
I've asked that a few times in various threads and I saw other's asking similar questions during the live feed. For what ever the reason, they have gone unanswered. Personally, I am not sure why it was brought up in the first place if discussing it was off limits. With as many meters being released, I'm sure there will be countless reviews of it. If there are problems with the hardware, I'm sure you will start hearing about them over the next several months.
On amp-hour he said the hardware change was a "nice to have" and nothing to do with a design problem.
I am a little confused by this, if it's got a "Hackable ST ARM Cortex M3 processor" but no firmware source code, is it really any different from most other equipment out there?
It's not great if we literately have to hack it to make changes. (decompile, figure out the mess, inject new instructions, etc...)
I see this as a great meter that is customisable for more niche applications, particularly with the SD and Bluetooth it has a range of possibilities that aren't possible with most other things.
But if those functions aren't tweakable without lots of mucking around then it gets very difficult.
The community could write replacement firmware of course however that would be a lot of duplicated work and I'd be concerned about safeguards not being in place, potentially causing damage to the meter with the wrong combination of registers and also the calibration data not being usable.
Most lower end meters use a ROM based micro or something not easily programmable. So its a bit better than that.
About the decompiling, that would only be possible if the manufacturer did not enable write protection.
Dave/manuf could be convinced to release the format of the calibration data, if an external EEPROM has been used. If they are using something internal to the micro thats a bit trickier.