Everything with a battery should have an off switch
(Background: I work in product design&#x2F;new product development, and conceivably might have designed this thing! If any of those were still designed in the Western world. Which they aren&#x27;t. I <i>have</i> designed some stuff like it, though!)<p>Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off.<p>(It is especially fun to put something together for the Very First Time, then realize you can&#x27;t turn it off... and you need to turn it off because it&#x27;s the Very First Time this thing has ever existed at all, and it isn&#x27;t quite right, and you need to fix something. But it can&#x27;t be turned off, and this is somehow by design.)<p>(Our design team will never listen. This is because they, one, don&#x27;t listen to anyone ever; and two, never use the products they design. Oh, sure, there might be a user study or two. But they never actually have to <i>live with</i> or <i>work with</i> the damn things.)<p>&gt; They never seem to just use the bluetooth module as the sole microcontroller<p>We actually do this! It works pretty well.<p>&gt; and also it&#x27;s not like microcontrollers are expensive these days. with a blobbed-on IC of some 8-bit custom non-programmable thing, they&#x27;re probably spending like 1-2 cents each<p>Yeah I wish we could get those prices. But we don&#x27;t do COB (chip-on-board) and we only use microcontrollers we can get and read datasheets for, so we pay at least 20x that price. Maybe that&#x27;s why we don&#x27;t have any clients?