I made a smart watch from scratch • Hacker News Board

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#181

Post by kkarakk » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

praneshp wrote: post #111

blinky1456 wrote: post #3

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.

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…

Shoddy development and Samsung go hand in hand. No matter the product - their customizations on top of Android are invariably bonked after an OS update, their watch OS is weird and buggy to develop for, their mobile OS(that they seem to have abandoned) was also weird and buggy to develop for and irritatingly hard to deploy to...

all they seem to focus on is a finished LOOKING end product. i rejected a job at samsung dev based only on that knowledge - who wants to work for a company with an almost institutional disregard for software?

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#182

Post by kkarakk » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:25 AM UTC

frenchy wrote: post #93

bluGill wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do women put up with that?

That's a good question. This comes up every-now-and-then with my wife. She's usually says that pockets don't really matter, and then I point out that I have to carry her goods in my pockets. I suspect it's something really subtle along these lines: Beautiful women can often get by being useless, so women in general acrew certain trappings of uselessness so as to associate themselves with beauty. It's sort of like men…

i don't think it's "uselessness" as much as aesthetics. form over function is always the primary consideration. there is no demand for pants with pockets and the rest follows. as a dude i've started preferring jeans with comically useless small pockets because i always carry the only things i need(smartphone has a wallet stuck onto it) in my hands

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#183

Post by kkarakk » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:27 AM UTC

moreentropy wrote: post #13

The CCCamp 2019 badge will be a (low cost) smart watch called card10: https://gitlab.hamburg.ccc.de/card10/logix

how do you interact with anyone presenting at/participating in CCC? does everyone just meet on day of? i have a hard time reading any of their material and there's never any links on who to ask questions to. OR do they just like it that way

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#184

Post by skummetmaelk » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

alphakappa wrote: post #169

bicx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they don't show is how often it turns on when he doesn't want it to. That was probably a tough calibration to make for other manufacturers, especially when production smartwatches have much higher-resolution screens and processors that drain battery.

That is absolutely correct. Figuring out when the watch is in an upright position is trivial. Figuring out whether the user intended to actually get it to turn on is extremely hard, and it involves looking at the history of motion that preceded it, and making judgments based on a whole lot of user data. The other problem is making the tradeoff between detecting this fast enough (to turn on all the systems that follow…

Also the power cost of running this analysis all the time can be higher than just turning on the screen even though the user didn't "request" it.

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#185

Post by skummetmaelk » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:37 AM UTC

allanrbo wrote: post #145

simias wrote: post #143

Very impressive and inspiring. I've been thinking about making a custom keyboard for a while now but, while I have no problems with the electronic and software side of things, I'm a bit overwhelmed with the 3D modelling required. I tried learning Blender but it really feels ill-suited for designing physical objects. The author mentions considering openSCAD but I've heard pretty bad things about it so I haven't really…

OpenSCAD actually comes pretty natural if you are used to writing code

OpenSCAD is nice for simple geometry, but products today never have simple geometry. Doing bevels in openSCAD is a nightmare for example, and bevels are everywhere.

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#186

Post by skummetmaelk » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:39 AM UTC

duderific wrote: post #134

I'll take "things people without kids do in their spare time" for 200, Alex.

"Comments people who wish they were capable of doing such a project make on the internet for 800, Alex"

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#187

Post by ploika » Wed, May 01, 2019, 11:22 AM UTC

sizzle wrote: post #163

undefined1 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy... If you could choose any point in human history to be born, you'd be best off choosing today. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts... https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...

How would the world be today if the government pulled all the brightest engineers off working on optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies and paid them equally to solve these larger societal problems such as homelessness, reversing climate change/pollution, solving cancer, creating unlimited nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels, terraforming Mars for the humans, etc? I can only wonder... Thoughts?

Not significantly different to how it is today. Potentially much worse. It's solipsistic to think that more engineers and software developers would help with some of these social problems.

Sociology, economics and politics are difficult, valuable and all too often completely overlooked by people who have the luxury of being able to solve for x in their day job.

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#188

Post by mensetmanusman » Wed, May 01, 2019, 11:57 AM UTC

twaddler wrote: post #180

mensetmanusman wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness: unsolvable in a society where it is illegal to force someone to take care of themselves (by being sheltered). The west has decided that individual freedom is worth the cost of some people using it to choose to be homeless. I think this legal framework will make it impossible to solve homelessness. Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and objective well being. A majorit…

Poverty versus homelessness is an interesting cognitive reframing of the same fundamental problem. War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of individuals to transcend to rival collectives. So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth aga…

Thanks for the comment,

I was being a bit flippant in my comment because I take issue with the phrasing of these problems in the context of 'solutionism.'

We can, and have, eased poverty. Families aren’t having to eat their children as happened in 1920's Russia. We must strive to ease it our entire lives to add meaning, even if we know we will never reach the asymptote for the reasons I mentioned,

We must strive to ease war. Does that mean having a strong police-like presence in the Middle East, or just getting the fuck out? Our own society arose like a Phoenix from extreme violence, at we harming less developed countries by constant intervention in their sectarian violence?

We must strive to ease cancer, because we have to solve this before the heat death of the sun if we wish for humanity to survive afterwards.

Peace be with you

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#189

Post by Maarten88 » Wed, May 01, 2019, 12:07 PM UTC

foldor wrote: post #32

I'm still disappointed that new smart watch development has seemingly stalled in progress as of late. I was hoping that by this time we'd have watches that had 24 hour battery life, and an always on display that didn't need a flick of the wrist to activate. I hoped that wouldn't be asking for much, but I guess it's harder than I assumed.

I have a Garmin Fenix 5 that has this and lasts 2 weeks on a charge.

https://explore.garmin.com/fenix/

Re: I made a smart watch from scratch

#190

Post by atemerev » Wed, May 01, 2019, 12:40 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #168

lsiebert wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think William Gibson say something like, "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed." We have made great strides, but in the U.S. social mobility is lower now, life expectancy is down, so if you have to be born to a poor family, being born earlier might be better.

If you had the power to choose when to be born, you might also have the power to choose where to be born. In which case you might want to choose someplace other than the U.S.

There are few better places for social mobility than the US. If you are poor, but smart and ambitious, being in the US is the best thing that could happen to you.