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Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch
- kingbirdy 6y agoWhy does this article not have any pictures of the watch? It only has renders, even though the author supposedly has one.
- seism 6y agoThere are a few photos at https://www.instagram.com/p/CLfUCmVrChY/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CLfUCmVrChY/
- monocasa 6y agoAFAICT, those are renders too
- ohazi 6y agoReal pictures here: https://twitter.com/sqfmi https://twitter.com/sqfmi (scroll down a bit)
- gardenfelder 6y agoGreat link. Shows the product has evolved from the video linked elsewhere.
- jore 6y agoThere is an assembly video at https://youtu.be/PCPxTS1aF3w https://youtu.be/PCPxTS1aF3w
- tyingq 6y agoI suspect they are having trouble with their claimed 9mm thickness...thinner than the Apple watch.
- dandelany 6y agoPhoto (of mine) here: https://twitter.com/dandelany/status/1348224456640974850 https://twitter.com/dandelany/status/1348224456640974850 Just measured it at 9.3mm thickness with the battery - but it has no case.
- IrishJourno 6y agoI'm the author of the article and the editor of the section: a while back we decided to use illustrations rather than photography for this section of IEEE Spectrum—it was a style choice, but it gives us more options in terms of showing components and process diagrams.
- Alupis 6y agoWhy not do both when appropriate? Locking yourself into only using real images or renders seems very limiting.
- IrishJourno 6y agoWhen we made the switch, I was initially concerned about this as well, but as is often the case, well-chosen limits can promote creativity, just as say, choosing to work only in black and white might be done by a photographer or comic book artist, or choosing to use pixel art in a game built for modern systems. The illustrations also give a unified, and distinct, look to articles in the Hands On section, which is important in a crowded domain: the qualitative and quantitate feedback we've gotten since we made the switch has been quite convincing for me.
- ddlsmurf 6y agoI mean no offense, but you obviously know nothing about electronics, what prompted you to write an article on such a specialised subject ?
- jablan 6y agoHow exactly does limiting your language give you more options?
- IrishJourno 6y agoIt's the nature of abstraction: just like a map versus a satellite photo, it allows us to more easily highlight particular features. It also allows for options like cutaways and x-ray style images, and allows us to compose scenes how we like without the hassle of setting up physical shots.
- mumblemumble 6y agoThere are some on the manufacturer's website: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/gallery https://watchy.sqfmi.com/gallery
- barbs 6y agoLooks interesting! Any word on battery life? Couldn't seem to find anything...
- dandelany 6y agoI have one... The battery life is currently OK but not great - something like 55 hours. But I think this can be improved with some firmware changes - and the firmware is open source.
- gardenfelder 6y agoare those batteries available anywhere, or just form them?
- dandelany 6y agoThey are garden variety 3.7V 200mah 402030 pouch LiPos, which are pretty easy to find. More hardware details here: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/hardware https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/hardware
- xtiansimon 6y agoFunny the picture shows a subway exit. One of the apps I want from a smart watch is a compass. I work(d) in NYC and I’m always turned around when I exit the subway at an unfamiliar stop.
- johnjboren 6y agoWhen I lived in NYC during the Summers of 2005 and 2006 I carried a real compass for this exact purpose. Walking a block in the wrong direction before figuring it out was not worth going without.
- dheera 6y agoI found compasses don't work well in NYC either. My phone's compass is always wrong in NYC. I really wish NYC would paint or engrave a N/S/E/W indicator on the sidewalk at every subway exit.
- renewiltord 6y agoHow strange. Why is that? They use a magnetometer.
- toss1 6y agoExactly - the steel everywhere in the infrastructure, buildings, and vehicles messes with the ambient magnetic field so the magnetometer can't consistently get a true field reading.
- dividuum 6y agoRelevant link to the project: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy
- renewiltord 6y agoCool device. A bit short on the sensors, but I understand why for a first iteration. Hope it's successful enough that later revisions will include a few things I'm keen on: * Pulse ox * Continuous heartrate * GPS+Compass But it's a cool device anyway.
- mwambua 6y agoAdding those would be awesome (Especially if they could still keep the price under $100). The primary reason I use a smartwatch is for all the health-related features. I'd otherwise just wear a dumb watch whose battery will last me 10 years.
- mping 6y agoThe pulse ox is pretty cool to have around given that lots of people develop asymptomatic covid and are hospitalized much later with very low o2 sat.
- 3np 6y agoGPS and maaaybe compass are the only two things I lack in Watchy
- SilverRed 6y agoThe problem I have seen is the ultra cheap watches that have these features are so inaccurate that you may as well not have them. I'm not even convinced pulse ox is accurate on the Apple Watch. This product linked is more of a toy to play with and not what you would use daily.
- sfRattan 6y agoMaybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I have subzero interest in smartwatches, even hackable or open source models. I want my watch to tell me the time, and I want it to do so 10, 20, and 30 years from now without having to fiddle with software. I love Linux. I cut my teeth on it in high school after one too many viruses on Windows XP made me bite the bullet and try debian. I love my Raspberry Pi. It went from retro-gaming console to brief dev environment to Pi-hole server. There are tons of other hacked up solutions in my home. But sometimes I just want a tool that does one thing, essentially unsupervised, essentially forever. Apple Watch, Android Wear, Pebble, and now Watchy... All these devices will be e-waste in 30 years (most in less than 10). My Seiko automatic will still be ticking (and, as I wear it almost every day, I only wind it once or twice a year).
- Sodman 6y agoSounds like this watch is absolutely not for you then, and that's totally fine! For me, in 2021, a watch needs to display more than just date/time to earn a place on my wrist. I'm also ok spending another $50 every 3-6 years on a new watch, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Conversely, I'm not keen on the idea of having to manually wind my watch, or remembering to fix the date at the start of every month. More options is good for everyone though, so I'm glad both exist!
- stonesweep 6y ago> Conversely, I'm not keen on the idea of having to manually wind my watch, or remembering to fix the date at the start of every month. Side comment, we're well past this stage now. Pretty much every popular watch vendor (Seiko, Casio, Citizen, etc) makes a multitude of atomic clock sync solar models spanning the price spectrum (~$200 USD+). I am an analog watch fan but have been buying them for at least a decade; you set it up the first time, slap it on your wrist and never touch it again under normal circumstances. Just works.
- jagger27 6y agoI found I had to wind my Seiko far more often than that. Is this because you wear it daily and the self winder keeps it going? How often do you have to adjust the time?
- djrogers 6y agoThis looks interesting, but I’m always leery any time I don’t see any photos of the product - the linked article and it’s source both just have drawings. That’s kinda concerning.
- mumblemumble 6y agohttps://watchy.sqfmi.com/gallery https://watchy.sqfmi.com/gallery
- airbreather 6y agoLily Go have had something cheaper and maybe better, ESP-32 and I think there is a LORA version, that is something worth having https://www.banggood.com/LILYGO-TTGO-T-Watch-2020-ESP32-Main-Chip-1_54-Inch-Touch-Display-Programmable-Wearable-Environmental-Interaction-Watch-p-1730936.html?cur_warehouse=CN&rmmds=buy https://www.banggood.com/LILYGO-TTGO-T-Watch-2020-ESP32-Main...
- airbreather 6y agoThis is a bit bigger, but GPS and LORA, accelerometer, color screen, still cheaper https://www.banggood.com/LILYGOTTGO-T-Watch-ESP32-Chip-Programmable-Wearable-Environment-Interaction-Expandable-Silicone-Shell-Gel-Full-Coverage-Kit-p-1722494.html?cur_warehouse=CN&ID=6287843&rmmds=search https://www.banggood.com/LILYGOTTGO-T-Watch-ESP32-Chip-Progr...
- mlillie 6y agoComment there says they're only selling the "Basic" which doesn't include GPS or LORA
- airbreather 6y agoSearch around, AliExpress as well, I think it is just that particular vendor is out.
- Black101 6y agoThere are no open LoRa alternatives yet?
- tym0 6y agoThey have a newer version that's actually watch sized but neither have an eink display like the Watchy.
- geoffhill 6y agoFor cheap esp32-based smartwatches and wristbands, I've had good success with LILYGO and the esp-idf toolchain. $18 T-Wristband: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000527495064.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000527495064.html $26 T-Watch-2020: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000971508364.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000971508364.html esp-idf: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf
- ourcat 6y agoI have a couple of the £30 LilyGo 'TTGO T-Watch 2020' ESP32 based 'watches'. Lots of fun to tinker with and has a colour TFT touchscreen which introduced me to the very impressive lvgl library to create UI. But the battery life is not great (though that teaches you how to write and use deep sleep modes). An e-ink display would naturally help with the battery life, but the screen refresh times can be an issue for some ideas beyond telling the time.
- jmiskovic 6y agoI also got one of those, unfortunately the V1 which doesn't have the microphone. It has a decent feel to it, plenty of features packed into small form and decent amount of open source support. Hardware wise, display and touch sensor is quite good and I was surprised that I was able to type with 90% accuracy on a tiny qwerty keyboard. The tiny speaker is very low quality and not really usable for speech. There's also a vibration motor, acceleration sensor and IR transmitter (not sure if it can receive, schematics are not available). I was disappointed by the battery and even more with clumsy charging (micro USB with plastic cover) that I could not see myself using daily. The documentation is very thin and the digging soon hits docs written in Chinese. I enjoyed the blog post that walks through watch's hardware and brings it to life: https://nick.zoic.org/art/lilygo-ttgo-t-watch-2020/ https://nick.zoic.org/art/lilygo-ttgo-t-watch-2020/ Community is fragmented across C / MicroPython / Arduino / Scratch environments, as well as across different variants of TTGO watch. It's not too hard to find examples online, but putting them together into something useful takes time and effort. I chose T-Watch over Watchy because the touchscreen should allow for far richer interaction than 4 side buttons. On the other hand my watch is at the moment loaded with useless and too slow firmware that hangs after few minutes of use. I purchased the T-Watch without any delusions that I'm getting a functional watch. It works well as an isolated handheld ESP32 development platform.
- ourcat 6y ago> It works well as an isolated handheld ESP32 development platform. Exactly this. It's great for learning. I feel that once I get my head around things like lvgl and TFT touchscreens on this 'platform', then I should be able to do any type of (touch)screen UI. eg: 3D printers and other devices.
- Sodman 6y agoVery excited for something like this! I can think of a few fun projects to try that would be useful to me nearly everyday but are too trivial or niche for an Apple or a Samsung to ever spend time actually building. Some ideas off of the top of my head: - Vibrate a bunch and notify me on-screen if my usual commuter train is running late or cancelled (but only if I haven't left my house yet). Also the same, but in reverse for my commute home - One-button touch activate my IoT devices (toggle houselights, garage door opener etc) - Show me how many bikes/docks are left at my local citibike station - One-button touch to fake a phone call to my phone to get me out of a meeting/conversation in a pinch - Show me how many minutes until it's predicted to rain Nothing life changing, but a fun side project that will continue to be useful once it's finished by saving me 5-10 seconds here and there!
- brundolf 6y agoThese are great ideas that might actually be in the realm of feasibility (assuming your IoT devices run on some open standard), but the shame with this kind of thing in 2021 is that most of my digital life does not run on open standards, and so a programmable device has limited usefulness. I probably couldn't use it to play or control my media, to control my other (non-custom) devices, to display information from social media or from my bank accounts or tap into my subscriptions or interface with my personal cloud data. There are some exceptions and workarounds - most of them based on the web and web scraping - but most of those give you the sense that they only still exist because the company forgot about them, or doesn't care enough to retire them Walled-gardens have made it really hard to do novel things in your personal digital life
- IgorPartola 6y agoEven if your IoT doesn’t, I recently discovered Home Assistant which can basically tie together most IoT devices out there and give you a consistent platform to work against. A Raspberry Pi 4 is all you really need to get it going or you can even run it inside a Docker container. If you want IoT hardware you can control, check out Tasmota’s supported hardware list. Guys hardware often times can be easily flashed with it as it is all ESP8266 based, though some disassembly is required. Same with Sonoff products. Some really exciting possibilities here.
- dillondoyle 6y agoHas anyone found a good fitness metrics watch that is more open source (no monthly fee)? Oura looks new with no monthly subscription fee. It looks like horrible to wear for serious sport though. I have Whoop but will cancel the monthly fee once my intro period is over. But Whoop would be worth it for me if instead it would be a flat price own outright + they allow 3p access to all the data not just heart rate. The whoop in theory is great but it doesn't capture my sport's 'strain' well and the heart rate lags my treadmill band. I can't verify the sleep but it seems to be more accurate at least measuring my interruptions. But if it was flat rate not $30 a month i think it would be good enough.
- obenn 6y agoIn development: https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/ https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/
- dillondoyle 6y agointeresting thanks - though these things always look like cool ideas and render but never get made! I wonder if anyone has tried to read and see if the whoop bluetooth data beyond heart rate is decipherable. might be a cool way for me to learn something (or try to). i also have a climbing board controlled by bluetooth i wanted to see if i could 'hack'
- statenjason 6y agoFor another hackable smartwatch, see the PineTime. https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit
- teleforce 6y agoYes, PineTime is another low cost and cheaper open smart watch alternative (USD$25) but based on Nordic SoC nRF52832, check the previous PineTime discussions on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612223
- tekromancr 6y agoI am really stoked on how many opensource smatch platforms are coming out! Between this, the lilygo Twatch, and pine time, I have been drowning in neat tinkering options
- testmasterflex 6y agoBought this one a few months ago. Received it recently. I guess they were making them on pre-orders? To be honest I mostly bought it for the looks of it! Have not tried it yet as I’m abroad so can’t leave a review.
- vzaliva 6y agoI love the idea of smartwatches and owned several ones starting wit Pebble. But since I need reading glasses to read small print I have to give up on them and go back to old-school watch with hands. It is just not practical to stop in the middle of the street and put on my spectacles to read a notification.
- harry8 6y agoSo you need a smart watch with a bigger screen and font that you can't get at present. Others are almost certainly in the same boat. People who like tech of this nature are a generation who are aging so the demographic is growing. Everyone needs reading glasses if they live long enough. There's an opportunity there! I have no doubt it will happen. Who, how etc? We'll see.
- vzaliva 6y ago"According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction. About 64% of them wear eyeglasses, and about 11% wear contact lenses, either exclusively, or with glasses. Over half of all women and about 42% of men wear glasses." Apparently I am not alone and this statistics shows that smartwatches are not suitable for a significant part of population. In other words they will never be as poppular as smartphones. As to bigger screen suggestion, depending on how bad your vision is, you man need such a huge screen to read without glasses it becomes impractical.
- harry8 6y ago>depending on how bad your vision is, you man need such a huge screen [...] Upper limit of the minimum requirement is probably the size of the screen of the phone being used by the individual? Or do many people always use a phone with reading glasses (eg to check the time in a nice big font)? Those stats you've listed don't look so great. They seem to include those who are short-sighted and can read just fine without glasses. (Eg most children to people under about 40 who wear corrective glasses). Somewhere in middle age every single one of us needs reading glasses as our corneas harden. Long sightedness. This is the relevant thing for smart watches & smart phones. Either all of the middle aged to elderly must put on reading glasses to view their smart watch or they don't use one is the status quo. It really looks capable of being disrupted to me in a market that appears to be growing. Especially given the potential for health benefits of smartphone monitoring etc. which is more attractive to middle aged to elderly given the greater prevalence of medical conditions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sublimefire 6y agoFor some reason I did think of a "Garbage Watch" after reading the article. https://gizmodo.com/the-garbage-watch-is-a-piece-of-haute-ecology-1844458353 https://gizmodo.com/the-garbage-watch-is-a-piece-of-haute-ec... A couple of coloured wires would make Watchy a much cooler accessory.
- abetusk 6y agoWow, this article doesn't do it justice. Watchy is an open source hardware device that uses an e-ink display and has an ESP32 module builtin [0]. SQFMI, the creator of watchy, has a twitter account [1] which has some very nice screenshots [2] [3]. Even the CrowdSupply website has better pics of the device [4]. This is one of the few watches I've been sorely tempted to buy. [0] https://github.com/sqfmi/Watchy https://github.com/sqfmi/Watchy [1] https://twitter.com/sqfmi https://twitter.com/sqfmi [2] https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1351647180382228488 https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1351647180382228488 [3] https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1357177624523661315 https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1357177624523661315 [4] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy
- dandelany 6y agoThere is also a new Watchy community on Discord here: https://discord.gg/uKcfZZa2 https://discord.gg/uKcfZZa2 For those considering purchasing - as a Watchy owner - if you're looking for a polished smartwatch product that you can put on your wrist and not think about how it works - this isn't that product. It's still rough around the edges, uploading new watchfaces takes some work, phone notifications aren't implemented yet, no case, etc. But if you're intrigued by the idea of hacking on ESP32s, WiFi, BLE and/or e-ink, as a wearable hackable dev device, Watchy can't be beat. It's a lot of fun. Think of it as a wifi/BLE-enabled Arduino on your wrist.
- hu3 6y agoHow's the battery charge duration?
- ddlsmurf 6y agoIt will vary greatly with the watchface and whether you use wifi (weather, ntp, etc). In the current implementation it will do a full connect every minute so there's room for easy improvement. With wifi I get about 48h out of it.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
- mhh__ 6y agoOne thing I want is a smartwatch that buzzes when I've been talking too long
- znpy 6y agoI've seen some watches from the current wave of open-hardware models and i'm not sure i'm interested. The mi band 4 on my wrist is almost perfect, except I cannot pull data out of it natively. I'd love to be able to mess with data about myself in a quantified-self style. the pine time looks like it might be interesting in that sense, but it's bulkier than the xiaomi mi band 4 ...
- mixedCase 6y agoThis looks very good, but what can I do to get a smartwatch with a programmable microphone? The best experience I've had with a smartwatch was being able to respond to SMS with my Pebble Time through voice dictation. I'd love to have something that'd allow me to reply to voice messages on Signal or whatever platform I can hack on with a little bit of root.
- 3np 6y agoCan’t speak to its goodness but lilygo on banggood mentioned in another comment has mic and looks compelling
- mixedCase 6y agoLooking up the "LILYGO® TTGO T-Watch-2020" and it does not seem to have a mic.
- jmiskovic 6y agoThere are several versions with confusing names. V3 has the microphone. I think V2 was never mass-produced. Differences can be found in this table, which also links to AliExpress item listings: https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/TTGO_TWatch_Library#-version-comparison- https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/TTGO_TWatch_Library#-versi...
- EamonnMR 6y agoThis looks awesome and I'm gonna order one. Since Martian went away I haven't seen the 'smartwatches for people who are concerned with time and notifications but unconcerned with their own health ststus' market served bet much. The pine watch also looked cool but seemed less like something I could put on my wrist immediately. I think I'll make a F91W face.
- walrus01 6y agoIs it just me or is the vibration motor HUGE relative to the overall size of the PCB? https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy
- skykooler 6y agoCan this communicate back to your phone? One thing I loved with my Pebble was being able to pause/skip music on my phone without looking, using the physical buttons.
- nkellenicki 6y agoYes - the ESP32 is capable of Bluetooth Low Energy to talk with your phone. But, you're responsible for implementing the functionality you want yourself.
- liquidify 6y agosomeone needs to take those watches that never need to be charged and turn them into an open source hardware platform.
- flal_ 6y agoDoes anybody knows about something similar ( open hardware/source ) in the fitness watch space ? with a HR sensor + GPS ? I really like my Garmin, but no so found of sending them all this health related data...
- reedjosh 6y agoPlease this! I'm in the market for a replacement, but I hate the idea of paying a premium for a device that's still tattling on me.
- WhiteListed 6y agoI was looking into this but I have not found a satisfying solution. I ended up buying a Garmin Venu SQ with the following plan: - Use the Garmin Connect app without giving it permission to upload data. This makes the app basically useless expect for managing some settings and creating custom workouts on the device. - Use workoutizer (a pip package) to process my activity data. Workoutizer should be able to import the files from the garmin device and create some nice visuals from them. - For non-activity related data (ie. Sleep and continuos hearth rate monitoring) I am considering two options: 1) Ensuring that Gadgetbridge has support for the Garmin device. 2) Extending workoutizer so that it can also process other kinds of data (assuming that I can fetch that data directly from the device as well). For a more user-friendly alternative you might look into devices that are already supported by Gadgetbridge (my other option was buying an Amazfit GTS 2e which is already supported by Gadgetbridge). Still, I was bumped that there is not option that allows this out-of-the-box. But I think that I can get it working for me, without having to upload all my data to Garmin :)
- flal_ 6y agoOh, I didn't know about workoutizer, it seems like it could work for me. Thanks !
- dariosalvi78 6y ago- Banglejs has GPS but is big and has no established HR or step counting algorithms - PineTime is more Apple-like, but the firmware is less mature and has no GPS - TTGO T-Watch has no HR sensor AFAIK, but some versions may have GPS (see https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/TTGO_TWatch_Library https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/TTGO_TWatch_Library) - TTGO T-Wristband is like Miband but has no HR sensor again Of course, you could buy an Android watch or an Apple watch and program your own apps.
- tpoacher 6y agoSo, return of the Pebble watch? Which was bought and killed by Fitbit?
- aquir 6y agoWould be awesome if it would be waterproof or someone could design a waterproof case for it! Awesome project btw
- nemoniac 6y agoOgham? For real? Talk about a USP! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham
- itstrue 6y agoThis reminds me of Aaron Christophel's work [1] to get custom code onto cheap fitness trackers with the Arduino IDE. [1] http://atcnetz.blogspot.com/2019/02/arduino-auf-dem-fitness-tracker-dank.html http://atcnetz.blogspot.com/2019/02/arduino-auf-dem-fitness-...
- sqfmi 6y agoHey this is SQFMI here! Thank you for all the comments and feedback, happy to see all the interest :) We are hosting an AMA next Thursday (Mar 11, 2021) at 12:00PM PST https://discord.gg/tSrR5RWEhw https://discord.gg/tSrR5RWEhw Join us if you have any questions or suggestions, looking forward to connecting with everyone :)
- timonoko 6y agoWatch could and should be totally passive. You just fill the screen with one longass bluetooth message, and that is it. Maybe there should be a timer which blanks the screen after a minute, if the screen is not updated, but other hardware functions seem little superfluous. With Eink-display this would work for MONTHS.