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Open source smartwatch integrates ESP32 MCU with e-paper display
- tiernano 4y agothats very cool! If I had found this about 2 months back, I would have bought this over my Fitbit Sense 2!
- kkoste 4y agoI wonder what the battery life would be on this. But I am too lazy to do the math.
- tectec 4y agoI'd love a watch like this, but none of them seem to work with iOS. I don't know if sideloading iOS apps would help with that. Apple seems to keep the messaging and notification API's pretty locked down.
- Steltek 4y agoThe list of hobbies, ideas, and stuff in my house that will never work with Apple is endless. Once you choose Apple, you stop getting more choices.
- solarkraft 4y ago> I don't know if sideloading iOS apps would help with that. Likely. You currently need to do just that to install the Pebble app and it's a huge pain.
- crote 4y agoIt is a cute watch, but Micro USB is inexcusable in 2023. Especially at that price point: £57 is $70 or €64.
- schwartzworld 4y agoMicro USB is fine. Most people have a ton of them around, and they are cheaper than USBC. You enjoy paying a premium to not have to look at which direction you're plugging it in?
- blitzar 4y ago> You enjoy paying a premium to not have to look at which direction you're plugging it in? For that alone it is worth every single one of the 7c extra it costs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stronglikedan 4y agoAbso-effin-lutely!
- Findecanor 4y agoCables with reversible Micro USB plugs exist. Those are the only ones I use.
- fxtentacle 4y agoFully agree. An USB-C connector is thinner and even at low volume I can buy them for $0.04 each. And if you buy a full 1600 piece reel its $0.02 each. Plus you NEED USB-C if you want support for USB-PD (power delivery) or USB-BC (battery charging) because both standards rely on the CC lines that A- or B-type connectors lack.
- sprash 4y agoI have one of those. It takes a lot of work writing embedded C code to make it do what you want. In my case it was displaying a calendar and the moonphase. The default software is very bare bones. Battery life is 1.5 weeks for me when using ntp sync once a Day and a display update every minute without any further wireless communication. I find the PineTime more attractive because it has an aditional heart rate sensor and a color display with similiar battery life.
- daneel_w 4y agoThe schematic shows an RTC in there, does it really need to have its timekeeping syncronized every day next to startup?! Or it's just something you do to cover for eventualities?
- sprash 4y agoMaybe I'm doing something wrong but the RTC lags about a minute every three days. At least for my device a regular ntp sync is therefore absolutely required.
- charlesrocket 4y agoSome v1 units got defective RTCs so one would have to frequently sync time. My version had around 2 weeks of battery life (no ntp/etc). I can see getting way beyond that with accel and on-demand refresh instead of 1min intervals.
- boffinAudio 4y agoI have one of these, alongside a couple of PineTimes, some ESP32-vending machine clone 'smart watches', and even an Oscilloscope Watch, which uses the same CPU. Alas Watchy looks great on screen and in pictures, but on the wrist it is very bulky and uncomfortable. I would not rate the case design very high. I much prefer my PineTime Watch instead, its just a nicer form-factor. And it has an app store with tons of interesting stuff. One thing I wish these open source watches would do: agree on an API/ABI that would allow us to run apps from PineTime on Bangle, and vice versa. Someone should put Lua on all these machines and let us side-load bytecode, darn .. EDIT: s/PrimeTime/PineTime/g
- seszett 4y ago> PrimeTime Watch Do you mean PineTime, or is there a "PrimeTime" smartwatch that I don't know about?
- boffinAudio 4y agoSorry, thats a typo - yes I meant the PineTime Watch. I'll edit ..
- solarkraft 4y ago> One thing I wish these open source watches would do: agree on an API/ABI that would allow us to run apps from PineTime on Bangle, and vice versa. I've looked far and wide for a standard embedded OS that can just load binaries and didn't find much. IIRC Zephyr has a seemingly barely-supported feature for it and so does NuttX.
- boffinAudio 4y agoYeah, Zephyr seems closest to giving us this ideal, but I still honestly believe that Lua is the solution - this way we don't need loading/runtime linking, etc. Of course, this requires planning.
- solarkraft 4y ago
- tyingq 4y agoI'm pleasantly surprised the case itself manages to be ~ 15mm thick, which isn't exactly thin, but not bad. And it looks like there's opportunity to shave that down with different connectors, sinking the battery into the pcb, etc, as they iterate.
- fxtentacle 4y agoAbout 2 years ago, me and some friends produced a small batch of similar watches, but we used a different LiPo connector and USB-C to make it thinner and then we could get the cases down to 11mm thickness, which is comparable to the thinnest Apple Watch. So in general, ESP32 and e-ink is a pretty great basis to start from. Since this appears to be open source, you could, in theory, apply these modifications to their design and then produce your own batch of thin e-ink watches... If you do, please send them a pull request ;)
- crims0n 4y agoReally surprised someone has not filled the gap that Pebble left. Projects like this get close, but it still boggles my mind that over a decade ago we had a polished and commercial e-ink smartwatch with a 1-week battery life, 5 atm waterproof rating, integration with Android and iOS, a vibrant developer community, and a robust app store... and it all just, disappeared.
- crimsoneer 4y agoYeah, it's a pretty clear market failure in my book. I still find the whole saga pretty mystifying.
- theaussiestew 4y agoWould you buy an e-ink smartband if it came out?
- Steltek 4y agoMy Pebble watch and my dumb-as-bricks LCD TV. Elegant simplicity of a past generation that I can't let go of today because the modern replacement sucks. There's gotta be other things that fall in that category. 3.5mm headphones? Cars with tactile controls? Non-electric bicycles?
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago> "* 3.5mm headphones?*" Sure as heck aren't those. While I still want a physical connector, jiggling the cable to get a good connection when the jack started wearing out is something that should have been put it in its grave long ago.
- RobotToaster 4y agoWould be nice if it had some spare IO pins broken out so you could add your own sensors etc.
- analog31 4y agoI discovered much to my chagrin that the ESP32 Bluetooth module consumes a lot of power, affecting my quirky keyboard project. Is there a better method for syncing to a PC or phone?
- solarkraft 4y agoIf it's the actual radio: No. But if you want to optimise the time spent active (where most of the gains are), ESP-Now and BLE would be good options (though I suppose you're already using that?). Aside from that, NRF and Silabs chips have very low power radios with advanced features (advertising while the rest of the chip is sleeping).
- DrThunder 4y agoEh, as a hobby and something to mess around with I can see the novelty of this. However, the main reason I use a smartwatch is for the gps (typically I have a Garmin). I track my mountain bike rides, hikes, runs etc. Personally, I would just use an analog watch over something like this. It seems to not be "smart" enough to actual be all that useful.
- capableweb 4y agoYeah, I don't think this product (SQFMI Watchy - https://thepihut.com/products/sqfmi-watchy https://thepihut.com/products/sqfmi-watchy) is sold as a thing for consumers to just buy and passively use without being curious about the platform itself and wanting something to hack on. And the seeing what the sources (linuxgizmos.com and thepihut.com) are, kind of makes that point clear too, together with the fact that it comes in pieces you have to assemble yourself. A bit like commenting on a story about a new gaming laptops when all you use the Office suite and you don't see the value in the laptop presented.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoYou want OpenSmartwatch-gps: https://open-smartwatch.github.io/watches/gps-edition/ https://open-smartwatch.github.io/watches/gps-edition/ https://github.com/Open-Smartwatch/open-smartwatch-gps https://github.com/Open-Smartwatch/open-smartwatch-gps Admittedly somewhat abandonware due to difficulties in antenna design... A year ago, I enthusiastically jumped on the project and I've got a half dozen ESP32-pico-D4 and Quectel L96 GPS modules on my desk, a breakout board for one GPS module that only works with a powered antenna that's twice the size of my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, and a half-finished Kicad project to turn it into a watch, a very dusty RF design textbook that I've not read since 2011, and not enough time or energy to see it through.
- solarkraft 4y agoWhy does almost nobody use the Sharp Memory LCDs the Pebble Time used? They're close to perfect. The only other product with them I can think of is the Amazfit Bip/Banglejs.
- addaon 4y agoSharp even has some nice round color memory LCDs at this point, that still stay under 1 mA even at 20 fps, and are way under that for once-per-second updates. Besides the usual memory LCDs downside (25:1 contrast is truly bad, need a side-light for many use cases just like old-school digital watches did), I suspect the color reproduction is muddy as best. I'd still love one for a few use cases.
- daneel_w 4y ago"With only time keeping, Watchy should have a battery life of 5-7 days, while with fetching data over WiFi, it should last between 2-3 days." No thanks, that would be too vexing. Though I do see the attractive novelty of this device.
- polishdude20 4y agoWireless connectivity is great but the esp32 has terrible power consumption due to the wifi. A lot of times you can get by with Bluetooth. Of course, one then needs an app and a phone or other host device but the power consumption on Nordic Bluetooth chips is just miniscule.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI guess you could toggle wifi on and off to conserve power. The S3 uses about 20mA without wifi, which isn’t too bad. It’s on par with the Pi Pico and Arduino Nano Connect as I recall. They all guzzle power when wifi is enabled, otherwise idle fairly low and peak around 80-120mA depending on processor power.
- jareklupinski 4y agoi just finished an esp32 design with incredibly aggressive power savings as the primary goal it saves persistent variables to non-volatile storage and deep-sleeps at 15-20uA according to my power profiler 2, waking up on a timer when it wakes up, connects, checks battery, and updates display, it can peak 350mA, but mostly stays around 100-150mA while it works
- steve_adams_86 4y agoAwesome, I've been curious about deep sleeping. How long does it take to come back online?
- jareklupinski 4y agoCorrelating to current measurements, my first Serial log shows up almost as soon as I can see the current spiking from waking up (within a half-second) I haven't timed it super precisely (my off-state is 30 min and my on-state is 4-5 seconds), but definitely going to check this for thoroughly in my next project, which will wake from deep sleep on button press; curious if there's some delay as everything powers on.
- 4y ago
- biggedyb 4y agoI've got one of those. Hated the in-box case though so printed one of these: https://github.com/sqfmi/watchy-cases/tree/main/Flipped%20Chamfer https://github.com/sqfmi/watchy-cases/tree/main/Flipped%20Ch... Also didn't like the watch face so made my own from the default one, changed layout and font and stuff. Oh and replaced the strap with a velcro strap.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoLove the ESP32 but for me it would be too power hungry for the usecase.
- brokenmachine 4y agoWhat's the battery life like? I like the hackability but ESP32 seems like a terrible choice in terms of sleep current usage.