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I made a smart watch from scratch

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111–120 of 228 posts

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#111

I would have been impressed with anything functional, but to me this actually looks nicer than the vast majority of commercially produced smart watches. Awesome!

The Samsung smart watches look really nice to me, I don't know how decent they are in real life though since I don't own one.

I had a gear S for 2 years before I gave it away recently. The look attracted some positive comments, and the rotating bezel was a favorite of mine.

Anything software was shit (ie poorly done/buggy), and samsung used a lot of dark patterns (you have to install an app to get the watch paired, which is fair, but it keeps nagging you to install a second app).

My friend and I were one of the first batch of people to get it (preorder a few months before release), and had some issues initially that they quickly resolved (by sending us new watches)

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#113
post #64

We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.

>But for about $90 in parts Oh and I don't know, about $250K worth of professional experience and skills but yeah.. we have.

And a dollar for the piece of chalk.

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#115
post #23

The DA14683 is fantastic. I played a bit with an eval. board and it's really good for it's price vs. features (~$3 for 250 pcs. at Mouser). But soon the idea of releasing code for it as Open Source faded away, since you need to sign an SLA ( https://support.dialog-semiconductor.com/connectivity/reques... ), that limits the way source code based on their in SDK is released (only to your customer, in an only “need to k…

As I understand it, the designer used freertos. At that point, he can just give a readme with hand-wavey "get sdk, install freertos, find firmware files here... and here's all my code which I'm free to license as I wish" and no license infringement necessary. Not sure why a backdoor is needed, but then I've never built a project like this.

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#116
post #64

We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.

>But for about $90 in parts Oh and I don't know, about $250K worth of professional experience and skills but yeah.. we have.

And if you had zero of the tools and equipment beforehand used in the process, what would the additional cost be to just get started?

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#117
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure FreeRTOS has been open source since its inception in 2003, see posts going back to 2004 at [0]. Amazon forked it, merged their fork with the original project and took over it in 2017. You can read about it here [1]. [0] https://sourceforge.net/p/freertos/news/ [1] https://freertos.org/FAQ_Amazon.html EDIT: actually, I don't think they fully merged their fork as there's a variant called a:freeRTOS

FreeRTOS was previously GPLv2 with a couple of added clauses (anything linked with FreeRTOS is now GPL too and you can't publish performance metrics without approval). I'd imagine there were a lot of companies not wanting to GPL everything they made with FreeRTOS (i.e. Amazon) so with a new MIT license, anyone can do whatever they want.

>you can't publish performance metrics without approval

Curious to know if anything knows if that's actually enforceable. The GPL gives you permission to use an distribute a program and code. I can see where if you got your copy straight from RTOS, they can enforce that clause. But, to me, the GPL seems to give everyone the right to distribute the source without that clause. And it seems to explicitly forbid the addition of additional licensing terms:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#118
post #43

Considering there is still no good replacement for my Pebble Time, I might use this manual to build my own. The Rebble team might also be interested in this.

I have been looking for a replacement since the day Fitbit shutdown the pebble services. I am glad that Rebble team took over some of the services but it would still be nice to find a replacement. what do you think of wearOS based devices like fossil sport or Ticwatch pro?

I have been looking at this wiki to identify a few good replacements to pebble time: https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOS/wiki/watches

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#119
post #23

The DA14683 is fantastic. I played a bit with an eval. board and it's really good for it's price vs. features (~$3 for 250 pcs. at Mouser). But soon the idea of releasing code for it as Open Source faded away, since you need to sign an SLA ( https://support.dialog-semiconductor.com/connectivity/reques... ), that limits the way source code based on their in SDK is released (only to your customer, in an only “need to k…

HN needs to know; it's a front door.

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Samsung smart watches look really nice to me, I don't know how decent they are in real life though since I don't own one.

While it's not a proper smartwatch, i find withings' (Nokia) hybrid smartwatch[0] to be really aesthetically pleasing. [0]: https://www.withings.com/ca/en/steel-hr

aren't they pretty thick in real life
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