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I have a pinetime and the form factor is great (until I lost the back plate, next one will be sealed). All the opensource activity around the watch is also grea
by donpdonp 6y ago
I have a pinetime and the form factor is great (until I lost the back plate, next one will be sealed). All the opensource activity around the watch is also great. The biggest drawback to me is only 64k of ram. Thats a Commodore64's worth of ram. The 240x240 screen is 57kbytes, it must have its own display ram.
Also NordicSemi never seemed to be particularly opensource friendly. I'm hoping for a future RISCV edition of this watch with more ram.
- listic 6y agoDo you state that it has its own display RAM or doesn't it? 240x240 is ~56.25 kB at 8 bpp. the screen is RGB 65K colors, that is, 16 bpp; so the framebuffer size should be twice larger. I assume that the display controller has its own memory. True, you would need another 112,5 kB for double-buffering, but maybe you can do without it.
- deadw3ight 6y agoColor displays are great, but they should have had an option for a (color or black and white) e-paper display. More efficient for these purposes imo.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoI would pay so much for a hackable watch like this with a 3 or 4 color epaper display, I'd almost pay as much as an apple watch if it was high quality hardware and had a great open API and toolchain.
- rch 6y agoI'd pay more than for mass produced consumer gear, from any manufacturer.
- deadw3ight 6y agoGo on ebay and purchase a Pebble Time. Color epaper display, fully hackable even after being discontinued thanks to the dev community who continues to update it with "Rebble" the open source version of the OS it ran on.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoThanks!
- mavhc 6y agoePaper is just their name for a transflexive LCD display. It's not eInk type technology
- makomk 6y agoApache have a fully open source Bluetooth LE stack for most of the Nordic Semi chips, in part because they actually documented their radio hardware unlike most other manufacturers.
- plasticchris 6y agoI think the linux foundation has one in zephyr as well.
- pantalaimon 6y agoZephyr uses NimBLE
- grawp 6y agoExactly!
- deadw3ight 6y agoYeah, the original Apple watch had like half a GB, and a raspberry pi zero ($5 price) has the same. Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?
- leoedin 6y agoIt's a microcontroller rather than an application chip - so the amount of RAM will always be significantly less. A really beefy high end microcontroller might have 1MB of internal RAM - and for most applications that's more than enough.
- deadw3ight 6y agoOhhhhh, I didn't realize that. Makes a lot more sense, I guess it is a better comparison to an Arduino than a raspberry pi.
- mschuster91 6y ago> Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size? Oh they could have. The problem is: it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you and most of the documentation is under NDA.
- deadw3ight 6y ago> it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you That's a really good point. I remember having the Pebble watch (this was pre-Apple and Android watches) and I think it had 128 KB of RAM total, including OS, background tasks, apps, etc. That was a mass produced and commercialized item though.
- mschuster91 6y agoI've written about the other challenges in another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25252022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25252022
- 6y ago