3 ms·

I really wish this had a few more sensors, particularly a barometer, heart rate sensor, and touch screen, these would make it much more useful. I realize it's

by dheera 5y ago

I really wish this had a few more sensors, particularly a barometer, heart rate sensor, and touch screen, these would make it much more useful. I realize it's FOSS hardware but I'm more of a software person and would probably take me too long to figure out how to hack all those things in and get it manufactured ...

Fnoord 5y ago
Heh, I actually prefer the smartwatches without touchscreen. Physical buttons keep the screen clean. You just need enough of them. I believe the sweet spot is 4. Pebble did it right.
- djrogers 5y ago
  Strongly disagree there - I put up with my pebbles’ poor UI and controls until I got my first Apple Watch. It’s 10x more useful, and way more user friendly.
  - jsight 5y ago
    Fair, I'm a big fan of the Pebble, but I mostly put up with the UI due to the always on screen and battery life. Its not really great from a UX perspective in general.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    > It’s 10x more useful, and way more user friendly. It just isn't in my use case. For me, the only use of a watch is on the go. When I'm not on the go, I already have a computer w/me which is more powerful than any smartwatch. Therefore, if I am on the move, I want to blindly use my watch, just like I type this message blind on a keyboard. Physical buttons aid with that. If I am catching a bus, I want to be able to control Spotify. If I am running, I want to be able to control Spotify. Touchscreens are far more cumbersome in that regard. Apple Watch, yes very powerful computer, beautiful screen, and very expensive (more so if you want the medical features). You have to give it juice every night, and it requires either a 4G connection or you're having to pay for another plan or it uses Bluetooth w/your smartphone. These devices don't have enough storage for my liking. I mean, I am sure I could add and use a microSD with 256 GB or more to it, if it had that option. Instead we gotta rely on very little storage, Bluetooth with smartphone, or another SIM + data plan. All in all a completely different purpose and price class.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Agreed, as an object for geeks sensor quantity is critical. Barometers in waterproof devices are tricky, and a heart rate sensor is still an exotic manufacturing challenge, not an off the shelf product. And I don't personally need a touchscreen, I think app development for the form factor is far easier without the temptation of impossible touch targets and cryptic gestures. But the critical sensor to me is GPS, without that it and the PineTime are useless to me. The only sensor on this is the Bosch BMA423 3-axis accelerometer. Unfortunately, that has no gyro or magnetometer, which makes it a bit of an odd choice. It's supply constrained, and has an EOL date of Sept 2021 to boot. The other sensor is a DS3231MZ low-power highly-integrated real-time clock. It's also out of stock, and has a 42 week manufacturer lead time. I've got some experience developing embedded hardware, but the watch form factor is really hard to hack after the fact. It's not particularly friendly to expansion busses and add-on cards...
- dheera 5y ago
  > the critical sensor to me is GPS How accurately do you care about geolocating yourself? If you only care about <50m accuracy for the watch to be able to provide you location-based behaviors, I've had very good results doing Wi-Fi scans with ESP32 devices (in particular, a FeatherS2) and feeding the results into the Google and Mozilla geolocation APIs. More than enough to pull up the local weather or public transit info for the bus stop in front of you. It could send data requests through your phone when you don't have Wi-Fi. Obviously it won't have the accuracy and update rate that a GPS would, but on the upside, it does work indoors.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    I only care about outdoor high-accuracy positioning. I love my Garmin, but the aggressive price segmentation (even though I bought the device at the top of the list) is vexing and I would love to help build an open-source alternative. On the note of pushing data through a phone, I suppose I could stick a uBlox, ESP32, and tiny battery in a case on my belt, and push GPS data to the watch that way, but that's basically the same as the watch minus the display.

by dheera 5y ago

Fnoord 5y ago

Heh, I actually prefer the smartwatches without touchscreen. Physical buttons keep the screen clean. You just need enough of them. I believe the sweet spot is 4. Pebble did it right.

djrogers 5y ago
Strongly disagree there - I put up with my pebbles’ poor UI and controls until I got my first Apple Watch. It’s 10x more useful, and way more user friendly.
- jsight 5y ago
  Fair, I'm a big fan of the Pebble, but I mostly put up with the UI due to the always on screen and battery life. Its not really great from a UX perspective in general.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  > It’s 10x more useful, and way more user friendly. It just isn't in my use case. For me, the only use of a watch is on the go. When I'm not on the go, I already have a computer w/me which is more powerful than any smartwatch. Therefore, if I am on the move, I want to blindly use my watch, just like I type this message blind on a keyboard. Physical buttons aid with that. If I am catching a bus, I want to be able to control Spotify. If I am running, I want to be able to control Spotify. Touchscreens are far more cumbersome in that regard. Apple Watch, yes very powerful computer, beautiful screen, and very expensive (more so if you want the medical features). You have to give it juice every night, and it requires either a 4G connection or you're having to pay for another plan or it uses Bluetooth w/your smartphone. These devices don't have enough storage for my liking. I mean, I am sure I could add and use a microSD with 256 GB or more to it, if it had that option. Instead we gotta rely on very little storage, Bluetooth with smartphone, or another SIM + data plan. All in all a completely different purpose and price class.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

Agreed, as an object for geeks sensor quantity is critical. Barometers in waterproof devices are tricky, and a heart rate sensor is still an exotic manufacturing challenge, not an off the shelf product. And I don't personally need a touchscreen, I think app development for the form factor is far easier without the temptation of impossible touch targets and cryptic gestures. But the critical sensor to me is GPS, without that it and the PineTime are useless to me. The only sensor on this is the Bosch BMA423 3-axis accelerometer. Unfortunately, that has no gyro or magnetometer, which makes it a bit of an odd choice. It's supply constrained, and has an EOL date of Sept 2021 to boot. The other sensor is a DS3231MZ low-power highly-integrated real-time clock. It's also out of stock, and has a 42 week manufacturer lead time. I've got some experience developing embedded hardware, but the watch form factor is really hard to hack after the fact. It's not particularly friendly to expansion busses and add-on cards...

dheera 5y ago
> the critical sensor to me is GPS How accurately do you care about geolocating yourself? If you only care about <50m accuracy for the watch to be able to provide you location-based behaviors, I've had very good results doing Wi-Fi scans with ESP32 devices (in particular, a FeatherS2) and feeding the results into the Google and Mozilla geolocation APIs. More than enough to pull up the local weather or public transit info for the bus stop in front of you. It could send data requests through your phone when you don't have Wi-Fi. Obviously it won't have the accuracy and update rate that a GPS would, but on the upside, it does work indoors.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I only care about outdoor high-accuracy positioning. I love my Garmin, but the aggressive price segmentation (even though I bought the device at the top of the list) is vexing and I would love to help build an open-source alternative. On the note of pushing data through a phone, I suppose I could stick a uBlox, ESP32, and tiny battery in a case on my belt, and push GPS data to the watch that way, but that's basically the same as the watch minus the display.