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Very 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 Ap
by Sodman 6y ago
Very 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.
- johnwyles 6y agoHome Assistant + Node Red ~= 95% of anything I have ever needed of IoT (and this watch could tie into by extension). Albeit, I have put in easily >120 hours of work over the past couple of years to get it there, I still think it's mostly the answer to the issues you mention.
- SilverRed 6y agoHalf of this stuff could trivially be done on the Apple watch if you develop an iphone app for it. It would be nice if Apple opened it up to allow custom watchfaces but its already pretty open as it is.
- ehnto 6y agoThe Samsung watches can do it all and custom watch faces, but both aren't really the same premise as Watchy. Like someone else mentioned, it's more like an arduino on your wrist. An apple watch or samsung watch are tightly bound to a higher level ecosystem. I can't even be bothered setting up the tooling to develop on Tizen anymore. Such a pain in the ass.
- newsbinator 6y agoFor the one-button touch to fake a phone call, add a 60-second delay before call happens and don’t touch your watch during that time, for maximum deniability.
- zikzak 6y agoThere should be delay that is long enough that anyone would forget the rich, but it should also be "random". You'd want to avoid using it too often around observant people (one every two months, maybe). The watch touch and ringing won't give someone away but thier bad acting will.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoSurely the real trick is to activate it blindly with your hands under a table or whatever? (Yes, also with a delay so you can have your hands visible when you get the call)
- TheRealSteel 6y agoHow often are you little in this situation that you need a fake phone call...?
- mosselman 6y agoEven if it never happens, it is still fun to think about.
- Cro_on 6y agoPossibly a lot more if I could make it convincing...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoNever:) Still fun to consider
- ipiz0618 6y agoI might actually steal some of these to develop on my RPi..