17 ms·

Hacking the Timex m851

313 points by taviso 3y ago

jstanley 3y ago
Very cool. If you're interested in something with a bit more features, check out the Bangle.js[0]. The benefits are you have Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, vibrator, and a colour screen. The main downside is that the battery lasts considerably less than 3 years. [0] https://banglejs.com/ https://banglejs.com/
- vosper 3y ago
  For anyone wondering, the battery on the Bangle is claimed to be 4 weeks. > With a sunlight readable always-on screen, 4 week battery life, complete flexibility, and complete control of your data, Bangle.js 2 is a refreshing break from expensive smart watches.
  - forkerenok 3y ago
    Can confirm from personal experience: in standby mode with infrequent app usage it was clocking a good 4 weeks.
djmips 3y ago
There's a new model that looks the same? https://www.timecentershop.gr/ents/timext53722.html https://www.timecentershop.gr/ents/timext53722.html
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Hardly new, Amazon lists is as discontinued by the manufacturer which probably explains why it's tough to find.
  - djmips 3y ago
    It was just odd that it was listed as in stock and also had a different model than m851 - but maybe that refers to the processor?
aziwa475 3y ago
Cool. Any idea where to buy these? Thanks
- thih9 3y ago
  > Now that I’ve told you how much I love this thing - the bad news. > They’re long out of production, and getting hard to come by. > I bought a set of two on eBay, they just needed new batteries and were as good as new.
brudgers 3y ago
More on the Timex Datalink series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Ironically, I find their older models with optical receivers a lot more high-tech than the later USB models.
  - Epa095 3y ago
    I guess it's one way? But yes, very cool. I can imagine using it with my phone to sync useful stuff directly from my phone to the watch without a cable.
- xattt 3y ago
  Why was could it only encore with a CRT and not an LCD? Could this be replicated with modern IPS LCDs?
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    It’s the scanning beam, that LCDs simply don’t have. But fear not, a single LED will also work and was recently reverse engineered: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/691827 https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/691827
  - canucker2016 3y ago
    Also CRT monitors were ubiquitous. consumer LCD monitors didn't start appearing until the late 1990s. It was magical watching a Timex DataLink watch receive data (at a really slow data rate though) - short moment in time before USB and WiFi appeared.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
I really wish more watches/wearables would be made with these 8-bit low-power chips and have exposed data pins to make them hackable. 3 years battery life is where it's at for a watch. If I have to think about charging my watch is a no-go for me.
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  I keep buying cheap mechanical (wind up) watches and Swatches off eBay. My current Swatch has been telling time consistently for about a year on the same battery. The problem with cheap mechanical watches is you can over-wind them if you're not careful. I keep killing them every couple of years. But hey, they're cheap. The cool thing about both these watches is you don't have to recharge them every day (though you do have to wind up the wind-up watch.)
jeroen79 3y ago
Cool, but its not really hacking if you just use an sdk to write code for a platform.
- _joel 3y ago
  I think you misunderstand the origin of hacking. It's not about breaking into systems, that's cracking. Using an SDK to program a watch is definitely hacking on the watch. The media are generally to blame for this miscategorisation.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    Using an SDK to program a watch is... programming a watch? Otherwise every iOS developer is iPhone hacker? I'm not an English native speaker, however to me "hack" means something not standard. Not necessary cracking, of course, but just using SDK to write some software does not sound like something very "hacky". Those watches were explicitly designed to be extendable.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      The "hacky" part is that he didn't use the official "Windows XP-era wizard" development environment. Instead, he works under Linux with standard Makefiles, using wine and calling the compiler directly.
    - _joel 3y ago
      Yet here we are on a site called "Hacker News" with the current top story being about a consensus algorithm with a load of implementations and real world usage, libraries in multiple languages. The original term comes, afaik, from journalists who would hack on typewriters, hence hacks.. it's another evolution, but I'm not great with etymology.
      - OhMeadhbh 3y ago
        Well. It also purports to be a tech site when it's really a finance site.
psychphysic 3y ago
This does seem nice and even simpler than TI's Ez430-chronos [0]. That said, 3 years on a single battery doesn't seem great of course I suppose it depends what apps you use and load..and that it's programmable that is cool. [0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10019 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10019
- pard68 3y ago
  Battery life is probably relative. I lost one of my Casio F91s in 2018. Found it last week while packing for a canoe trip, the time and date were within seconds of the Casio F91 on my wrist.
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  Can you still buy the chronos? I bought one a while back and it disappeared in a move. Would love to monkey with it again. [Edit: Oh. Okay. I see that you included a reference to the "RETIRED" product listing. I mean, it wouldn't be a TI product unless TI EoL'd it just as it was getting market traction.]
TapamN 3y ago
I got one of these for my birthday in 2003, and I'm still using it. The Data Link USB "only" has a battery life of about a year. The 3-year life Data Link would be the older model, that optically received data from a PC by watching light pulses from a CRT. I don't know why he's complaining about the Windows 98/XP PIM software. It worked fine, and it's open source <https://sourceforge.net/p/datalinkusb/code/HEAD/tree/USBPIM/ https://sourceforge.net/p/datalinkusb/code/HEAD/tree/USBPIM/>. It does not work on Windows 10 and later, however. I looked into it years ago, and it seemed related to the GUI code (I think it used MFC?) and not anything involving watch access. Probably fairly easy for someone familiar with Windows dev to fix, especially with the source. Edit: Wait, I misread. He was complaining about the SDK wizard, not the PIM. Yeah, the wizard wasn't great. Also, it was slow since every file assembled had several megabytes of headers included. Having C code running on the watch is nuts. The builtin ROM software was written in a high-level assembler (probably for size/CPU/power consumption reasons), and the user SDK was a regular assembler (I got the impression that back then Epson wasn't giving away the better development software, so the best that could be included for free with the SDK was the regular assembler.) The OS's overlay system and semi-adhoc calling convention isn't C friendly. Often, values were passed in whatever registers were convenient for the callee, with macros to help hide this when possible. EEPROM access functions took parameters from global RAM variables. The SDK documentation was great. 10/10. You could not reasonably ask for more. It had many examples, every single header file used by Timex, which documented every single function and variable (even ones internal to the builtin software), and PDFs describing every bit of data going in and out of the watch, from the communication protocol to the file formats used by every builtin app. The OS used by the watch is impressively clean and easy to use for a one-off 8-bit system. Most development for the watch was shared on a Yahoo Group, which is down now, but there are backups somewhere. I manually saved a bunch, and I know that people there backed up the messages and uploaded them to... I don't remember exactly where, I'd have to look it up. I remember running across a post there from the EEVBlog guy when looking through old posts. He was asking about making a fitness tracking app. It took me a long time to get around to writing anything for it, but I wrote several programs for it around 2013-2015ish. A timer, calender, expense tracker, and a viewer for the user tracking data (stuff like how many times you've pressed a button, entered an app, or had an alarm go off). The SDK had a single DOS program as part of the build process (it was something to feed the linker some addresses), so I had to rewrite a 32-bit version to get the SDK to work on 64-bit Windows 7. I think I later found someone else already did that on the Yahoo Group.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
puzzlingcaptcha 3y ago
I am most impressed by the documentation provided in the references. Looks like it was ahead of its time.
- nxobject 3y ago
  Credit where credit is due; I can imagine many people here right now would want to find the "NINO ALDRIN L. SARMIENTO" credited in the changelogs and shake their hand...
  - TapamN 3y ago
    Fun fact: It's possible to password protect apps using the PC software with a two character password (there's no encryption, it's just intended to slow down anyone from casually examining user data if they happen to find the watch unattended). When the DLU boots up, it initializes the password variable to "NS". It doesn't really mean much, since all apps default to unprotected on boot, so you can never use it, but it's interesting.
nxobject 3y ago
Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) is: when running at a low-power mode at 32kHz, it consumes an astoundingly low 9 microamps. [1] How much do you think you could get done with a cycle budget of 32k per second? That, and alongside 48K ROM and 2K RAM, you get 3 timers, a UART, and an A/D converter. [1] https://global.epson.com/products_and_drivers/semicon/pdf/id002478.pdf https://global.epson.com/products_and_drivers/semicon/pdf/id...
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  There's an ultra-low power mode in newer TMS430s, and you can use an external ultra-low-power RTC. From memory, it's under 100nA on paper, including things like the power switch leakage. Crazy stuff.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    Do you mean the TI MSP430?
    - WithinReason 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430
    - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      Ugh yes! Don't know why I always get that wrong!
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) Would it blow your mind that such ultra-frugal 8-bit parts have been available for about 30 years now? Those Seiko-Epson chips, alongside with EM-Swatch, and OKI-Casio chips, were used in all kinds of timekeeping, calculator, thermometers, and all kinds of cheap low-power widgets with segment LCD displays that need to run years on a single button cell. I have a calculator and a digital fever thermometer(the stick-type ones for the armpit or anus) that's over 15 years old, also using on one of those Seiko-Epson chips and it's still running on the same 1.5v button-cell that it came with, which is mind blowing when you factor in the charge decay of the lithium cell over time.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
GaggiX 3y ago
>a single battery can last 3 years! This is a big selling point for me, I don’t think they’re making consumer watches like this any more. Well Casio surely does. Search "Casio MIP display".
WithinReason 3y ago
I had this watch about 15 years ago. Among other things I could track: 0. Where my next class is going to be 1. Store the bus schedule to the bus stops I used 2. The phase of the moon Checking the bus schedule on your watch before smartphones looked like a James Bond move :) I wish they still made watches like this, at this power consumption you could keep your watch charged from solar power indefinitely
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >I had this watch about 15 years ago.[...]Checking the bus schedule on your watch before smartphones looked like a James Bond move :) To be fair, the first iPhone was launched 16 years ago, and smartphones that could store a bust schedule have been around even before the first iPhone. I would store the bus schedule as an SMS draft on my Siemens phone over 20 years ago.
  - warning26 3y ago
    The James-Bond-like part is doing it from your watch specifically. (Consider the various wrist-gadgets found in the movies over the years.)
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Casio Databank watches had that functionality in the early 90s I think (without the USB/IR PC link). Not that James Bond for the year 2000.
  - stenius 3y ago
    wow, I can't believe the iphone is 16 years old. I also had this watch and it came well before it. Maybe 2002?
  - OhMeadhbh 3y ago
    My Treo could hold quite a few bus schedules (the Caltrain schedule, too!). And it had a very crappy web browser (by today's standards) that worked "okay" for mostly text pages. Jeff Hawkins even used it to buy a book from Amazon as a test. I think my point is pre-iPhone phones weren't completely crappy. I still sort of miss the danger hiptops.
hnwizard 3y ago
oh well
- 0xEF 3y ago
  This comment reads like it was written by one of my high school teachers. "You are so capable, you should apply yourself more" is really just the worst thing you can say to a person who is actually enjoying what they do. What prompts people like you to think you have any measurable influence in telling someone to do something that you find more useful? Is it a lack of talent on your side, or just entitlement?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sandreas 3y ago
Well, maybe a more modern approach to a hackable watch is https://github.com/sharandac/My-TTGO-Watch https://github.com/sharandac/My-TTGO-Watch I stumbled over this, while I was researching for building my own DIY iPod Nano 7G with the LILYGO T5 E-Paper dev board Product: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002474854718.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002474854718.html Code-Repo: https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-T5-Epaper-Series https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-T5-Epaper-Series This would be an amazing iPod Nano 7G replacement, if I had more time and more skill in arduino stuff ;)
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  I have a couple of these things. Battery life is pretty crappy. The stock code barely worked and had about 12 hours of battery life (if you didn't do anything with it.) I mean... give credit where credit is due though... it's an amazing buy if you're hip to debugging other people's code. I eventually filled in some of the bits that weren't finished and eventually figured out settings so it's not completely sucking down power, so it would last about 6 hours with "moderate" use. I would be surprised if the current code isn't MUCH better, but it's power budget is going to be much closer to an Apple or Samsung smart-watch and not an 80s era ultra-low-power m851. If you're hip to experimentation (like I am) it's a fun little project and worth the money. If you're looking for something to compete with an iWatch, you're going to be disappointed.
omershapira 3y ago
This is a reminder that we can, in fact, have Nice Things – if there only were a market for Nice Things. I'd love to have a decently integrated watch with low battery usage (and generally low stakes for wearing/replacing) which I can also agree with aesthetically. Bums me out that Sensorwatch [1] is the best we can do. [1] https://www.sensorwatch.net https://www.sensorwatch.net edit: Sensorwatch is amazing, but not an ecosystem (yet).
- badRNG 3y ago
  That looks promising; what sorts of things can you do with the board? What would one like to do with the board?
ck2 3y ago
Does the Timex m878 have the same core cpu? Because the m878 has GPS and ANT+ support which makes it exponentially more powerful.
CliffStoll 3y ago
Has anyone informed the original programmer, Nino Sarmiento?

313 points by taviso 3y ago

Very cool. If you're interested in something with a bit more features, check out the Bangle.js[0]. The benefits are you have Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, vibrator, and a colour screen. The main downside is that the battery lasts considerably less than 3 years. [0] https://banglejs.com/ https://banglejs.com/

vosper 3y ago
For anyone wondering, the battery on the Bangle is claimed to be 4 weeks. > With a sunlight readable always-on screen, 4 week battery life, complete flexibility, and complete control of your data, Bangle.js 2 is a refreshing break from expensive smart watches.
- forkerenok 3y ago
  Can confirm from personal experience: in standby mode with infrequent app usage it was clocking a good 4 weeks.

djmips 3y ago

There's a new model that looks the same? https://www.timecentershop.gr/ents/timext53722.html https://www.timecentershop.gr/ents/timext53722.html

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Hardly new, Amazon lists is as discontinued by the manufacturer which probably explains why it's tough to find.
- djmips 3y ago
  It was just odd that it was listed as in stock and also had a different model than m851 - but maybe that refers to the processor?

aziwa475 3y ago

Cool. Any idea where to buy these? Thanks

thih9 3y ago
> Now that I’ve told you how much I love this thing - the bad news. > They’re long out of production, and getting hard to come by. > I bought a set of two on eBay, they just needed new batteries and were as good as new.

brudgers 3y ago

More on the Timex Datalink series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Ironically, I find their older models with optical receivers a lot more high-tech than the later USB models.
- Epa095 3y ago
  I guess it's one way? But yes, very cool. I can imagine using it with my phone to sync useful stuff directly from my phone to the watch without a cable.
xattt 3y ago
Why was could it only encore with a CRT and not an LCD? Could this be replicated with modern IPS LCDs?
- robin_reala 3y ago
  It’s the scanning beam, that LCDs simply don’t have. But fear not, a single LED will also work and was recently reverse engineered: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/691827 https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/691827
- canucker2016 3y ago
  Also CRT monitors were ubiquitous. consumer LCD monitors didn't start appearing until the late 1990s. It was magical watching a Timex DataLink watch receive data (at a really slow data rate though) - short moment in time before USB and WiFi appeared.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

I really wish more watches/wearables would be made with these 8-bit low-power chips and have exposed data pins to make them hackable. 3 years battery life is where it's at for a watch. If I have to think about charging my watch is a no-go for me.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
I keep buying cheap mechanical (wind up) watches and Swatches off eBay. My current Swatch has been telling time consistently for about a year on the same battery. The problem with cheap mechanical watches is you can over-wind them if you're not careful. I keep killing them every couple of years. But hey, they're cheap. The cool thing about both these watches is you don't have to recharge them every day (though you do have to wind up the wind-up watch.)

jeroen79 3y ago

Cool, but its not really hacking if you just use an sdk to write code for a platform.

_joel 3y ago
I think you misunderstand the origin of hacking. It's not about breaking into systems, that's cracking. Using an SDK to program a watch is definitely hacking on the watch. The media are generally to blame for this miscategorisation.
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  Using an SDK to program a watch is... programming a watch? Otherwise every iOS developer is iPhone hacker? I'm not an English native speaker, however to me "hack" means something not standard. Not necessary cracking, of course, but just using SDK to write some software does not sound like something very "hacky". Those watches were explicitly designed to be extendable.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    The "hacky" part is that he didn't use the official "Windows XP-era wizard" development environment. Instead, he works under Linux with standard Makefiles, using wine and calling the compiler directly.
  - _joel 3y ago
    Yet here we are on a site called "Hacker News" with the current top story being about a consensus algorithm with a load of implementations and real world usage, libraries in multiple languages. The original term comes, afaik, from journalists who would hack on typewriters, hence hacks.. it's another evolution, but I'm not great with etymology.
    - OhMeadhbh 3y ago
      Well. It also purports to be a tech site when it's really a finance site.

psychphysic 3y ago

This does seem nice and even simpler than TI's Ez430-chronos [0]. That said, 3 years on a single battery doesn't seem great of course I suppose it depends what apps you use and load..and that it's programmable that is cool. [0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10019 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10019

pard68 3y ago
Battery life is probably relative. I lost one of my Casio F91s in 2018. Found it last week while packing for a canoe trip, the time and date were within seconds of the Casio F91 on my wrist.
OhMeadhbh 3y ago
Can you still buy the chronos? I bought one a while back and it disappeared in a move. Would love to monkey with it again. [Edit: Oh. Okay. I see that you included a reference to the "RETIRED" product listing. I mean, it wouldn't be a TI product unless TI EoL'd it just as it was getting market traction.]

TapamN 3y ago

I got one of these for my birthday in 2003, and I'm still using it. The Data Link USB "only" has a battery life of about a year. The 3-year life Data Link would be the older model, that optically received data from a PC by watching light pulses from a CRT. I don't know why he's complaining about the Windows 98/XP PIM software. It worked fine, and it's open source <https://sourceforge.net/p/datalinkusb/code/HEAD/tree/USBPIM/ https://sourceforge.net/p/datalinkusb/code/HEAD/tree/USBPIM/>. It does not work on Windows 10 and later, however. I looked into it years ago, and it seemed related to the GUI code (I think it used MFC?) and not anything involving watch access. Probably fairly easy for someone familiar with Windows dev to fix, especially with the source. Edit: Wait, I misread. He was complaining about the SDK wizard, not the PIM. Yeah, the wizard wasn't great. Also, it was slow since every file assembled had several megabytes of headers included. Having C code running on the watch is nuts. The builtin ROM software was written in a high-level assembler (probably for size/CPU/power consumption reasons), and the user SDK was a regular assembler (I got the impression that back then Epson wasn't giving away the better development software, so the best that could be included for free with the SDK was the regular assembler.) The OS's overlay system and semi-adhoc calling convention isn't C friendly. Often, values were passed in whatever registers were convenient for the callee, with macros to help hide this when possible. EEPROM access functions took parameters from global RAM variables. The SDK documentation was great. 10/10. You could not reasonably ask for more. It had many examples, every single header file used by Timex, which documented every single function and variable (even ones internal to the builtin software), and PDFs describing every bit of data going in and out of the watch, from the communication protocol to the file formats used by every builtin app. The OS used by the watch is impressively clean and easy to use for a one-off 8-bit system. Most development for the watch was shared on a Yahoo Group, which is down now, but there are backups somewhere. I manually saved a bunch, and I know that people there backed up the messages and uploaded them to... I don't remember exactly where, I'd have to look it up. I remember running across a post there from the EEVBlog guy when looking through old posts. He was asking about making a fitness tracking app. It took me a long time to get around to writing anything for it, but I wrote several programs for it around 2013-2015ish. A timer, calender, expense tracker, and a viewer for the user tracking data (stuff like how many times you've pressed a button, entered an app, or had an alarm go off). The SDK had a single DOS program as part of the build process (it was something to feed the linker some addresses), so I had to rewrite a 32-bit version to get the SDK to work on 64-bit Windows 7. I think I later found someone else already did that on the Yahoo Group.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

puzzlingcaptcha 3y ago

I am most impressed by the documentation provided in the references. Looks like it was ahead of its time.

nxobject 3y ago
Credit where credit is due; I can imagine many people here right now would want to find the "NINO ALDRIN L. SARMIENTO" credited in the changelogs and shake their hand...
- TapamN 3y ago
  Fun fact: It's possible to password protect apps using the PC software with a two character password (there's no encryption, it's just intended to slow down anyone from casually examining user data if they happen to find the watch unattended). When the DLU boots up, it initializes the password variable to "NS". It doesn't really mean much, since all apps default to unprotected on boot, so you can never use it, but it's interesting.

nxobject 3y ago

Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) is: when running at a low-power mode at 32kHz, it consumes an astoundingly low 9 microamps. [1] How much do you think you could get done with a cycle budget of 32k per second? That, and alongside 48K ROM and 2K RAM, you get 3 timers, a UART, and an A/D converter. [1] https://global.epson.com/products_and_drivers/semicon/pdf/id002478.pdf https://global.epson.com/products_and_drivers/semicon/pdf/id...

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
There's an ultra-low power mode in newer TMS430s, and you can use an external ultra-low-power RTC. From memory, it's under 100nA on paper, including things like the power switch leakage. Crazy stuff.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  Do you mean the TI MSP430?
  - WithinReason 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    Ugh yes! Don't know why I always get that wrong!
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) Would it blow your mind that such ultra-frugal 8-bit parts have been available for about 30 years now? Those Seiko-Epson chips, alongside with EM-Swatch, and OKI-Casio chips, were used in all kinds of timekeeping, calculator, thermometers, and all kinds of cheap low-power widgets with segment LCD displays that need to run years on a single button cell. I have a calculator and a digital fever thermometer(the stick-type ones for the armpit or anus) that's over 15 years old, also using on one of those Seiko-Epson chips and it's still running on the same 1.5v button-cell that it came with, which is mind blowing when you factor in the charge decay of the lithium cell over time.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

GaggiX 3y ago

>a single battery can last 3 years! This is a big selling point for me, I don’t think they’re making consumer watches like this any more. Well Casio surely does. Search "Casio MIP display".

WithinReason 3y ago

I had this watch about 15 years ago. Among other things I could track: 0. Where my next class is going to be 1. Store the bus schedule to the bus stops I used 2. The phase of the moon Checking the bus schedule on your watch before smartphones looked like a James Bond move :) I wish they still made watches like this, at this power consumption you could keep your watch charged from solar power indefinitely

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>I had this watch about 15 years ago.[...]Checking the bus schedule on your watch before smartphones looked like a James Bond move :) To be fair, the first iPhone was launched 16 years ago, and smartphones that could store a bust schedule have been around even before the first iPhone. I would store the bus schedule as an SMS draft on my Siemens phone over 20 years ago.
- warning26 3y ago
  The James-Bond-like part is doing it from your watch specifically. (Consider the various wrist-gadgets found in the movies over the years.)
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Casio Databank watches had that functionality in the early 90s I think (without the USB/IR PC link). Not that James Bond for the year 2000.
- stenius 3y ago
  wow, I can't believe the iphone is 16 years old. I also had this watch and it came well before it. Maybe 2002?
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  My Treo could hold quite a few bus schedules (the Caltrain schedule, too!). And it had a very crappy web browser (by today's standards) that worked "okay" for mostly text pages. Jeff Hawkins even used it to buy a book from Amazon as a test. I think my point is pre-iPhone phones weren't completely crappy. I still sort of miss the danger hiptops.

hnwizard 3y ago

oh well

0xEF 3y ago
This comment reads like it was written by one of my high school teachers. "You are so capable, you should apply yourself more" is really just the worst thing you can say to a person who is actually enjoying what they do. What prompts people like you to think you have any measurable influence in telling someone to do something that you find more useful? Is it a lack of talent on your side, or just entitlement?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sandreas 3y ago

Well, maybe a more modern approach to a hackable watch is https://github.com/sharandac/My-TTGO-Watch https://github.com/sharandac/My-TTGO-Watch I stumbled over this, while I was researching for building my own DIY iPod Nano 7G with the LILYGO T5 E-Paper dev board Product: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002474854718.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002474854718.html Code-Repo: https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-T5-Epaper-Series https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-T5-Epaper-Series This would be an amazing iPod Nano 7G replacement, if I had more time and more skill in arduino stuff ;)

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
I have a couple of these things. Battery life is pretty crappy. The stock code barely worked and had about 12 hours of battery life (if you didn't do anything with it.) I mean... give credit where credit is due though... it's an amazing buy if you're hip to debugging other people's code. I eventually filled in some of the bits that weren't finished and eventually figured out settings so it's not completely sucking down power, so it would last about 6 hours with "moderate" use. I would be surprised if the current code isn't MUCH better, but it's power budget is going to be much closer to an Apple or Samsung smart-watch and not an 80s era ultra-low-power m851. If you're hip to experimentation (like I am) it's a fun little project and worth the money. If you're looking for something to compete with an iWatch, you're going to be disappointed.

omershapira 3y ago

This is a reminder that we can, in fact, have Nice Things – if there only were a market for Nice Things. I'd love to have a decently integrated watch with low battery usage (and generally low stakes for wearing/replacing) which I can also agree with aesthetically. Bums me out that Sensorwatch [1] is the best we can do. [1] https://www.sensorwatch.net https://www.sensorwatch.net edit: Sensorwatch is amazing, but not an ecosystem (yet).

badRNG 3y ago
That looks promising; what sorts of things can you do with the board? What would one like to do with the board?

ck2 3y ago

Does the Timex m878 have the same core cpu? Because the m878 has GPS and ANT+ support which makes it exponentially more powerful.

CliffStoll 3y ago

Has anyone informed the original programmer, Nino Sarmiento?