4 ms·

I 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

by ourcat 6y ago

I 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 ago
I 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.

by ourcat 6y ago

jmiskovic 6y ago

I 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.