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I 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.

I 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 ago
  Sorry, 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 ago
  Yeah, 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
    I think they are many ways. Old PCs, which current microcontrollers are approaching the power of, didn't depend on Lua to load arbitrary binaries. Many current Microcontrollers even have MMUs.
    - boffinAudio 4y ago
      .. but not many embedded developers have the chops to do dynamic linking and loading, on the other hand ..
bmsleight_ 4y ago
Same here - loved Watchy, built my own watchface. But it is not waterproof and kill a couple of Watchy(s) in the sea/shower. PineTime is not as good and harder to hack and contribute back to the firmware. But Pinetime is waterproof.

seszett 4y ago

> PrimeTime Watch Do you mean PineTime, or is there a "PrimeTime" smartwatch that I don't know about?

boffinAudio 4y ago
Sorry, 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 ago
Yeah, 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
  I think they are many ways. Old PCs, which current microcontrollers are approaching the power of, didn't depend on Lua to load arbitrary binaries. Many current Microcontrollers even have MMUs.
  - boffinAudio 4y ago
    .. but not many embedded developers have the chops to do dynamic linking and loading, on the other hand ..

bmsleight_ 4y ago

Same here - loved Watchy, built my own watchface. But it is not waterproof and kill a couple of Watchy(s) in the sea/shower. PineTime is not as good and harder to hack and contribute back to the firmware. But Pinetime is waterproof.