2 ms·

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 manufacturin

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.
  - azdle 5y ago
    https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ is working on a GPS edition right now.
    - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
      Oooh nice, I'll give it a look!

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.
- azdle 5y ago
  https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ is working on a GPS edition right now.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    Oooh nice, I'll give it a look!