141–150 of 251 posts
Has anyone thought about the potential of using these in embedded projects? It already has a powerful processor, and some outputs/inputs should be possible to reach by having a breakout board, and it comes with a screen so it would be useful for on-site configuration and diagnostics.
https://www.tindie.com/products/ttgo/t-wristband-diy-program...
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Bluetooth with onboard music (on some newer fitness watches) really sealed the deal for me. After going through a Pebble some years ago, I realized that I didn't actually care about the "smart" features as long as my next watch had excellent GPS performance, Spotify or some other music platform, and an always-on display to tell the time.
Any recommendations? I would love a watch that was dumb as a brick but played music and had gps. Bonus points if it is extremely simple.
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Amazfit Bip (S) has a GPS and still lasts for about 2 weeks in the same form factor.
How often do you use the GPS in those two weeks? It obviously only needs power if used, and tests I've read suggest it wouldn't last 2 days with lots of active GPS usage (which is to be expected, and not really a fault of the device!).
won't apple just murder this? its like a jackel trying to steal meat from a bear's meal
I have a pinetime and the form factor is great (until I lost the back plate, next one will be sealed). All the opensource activity around the watch is also great. The biggest drawback to me is only 64k of ram. Thats a Commodore64's worth of ram. The 240x240 screen is 57kbytes, it must have its own display ram. Also NordicSemi never seemed to be particularly opensource friendly. I'm hoping for a future RISCV edition o…
Apache have a fully open source Bluetooth LE stack for most of the Nordic Semi chips, in part because they actually documented their radio hardware unlike most other manufacturers.
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True, I guess the watch must have some sort of external circuitry that can wake it up every so often.
You can use the ESP32 onboard RTC to do periodic wakeups. (You can also use external stimuli via GPIO pins, but you don't need anything extra if all you want is a periodic wakeup.)
Ok, just to make sure I understand this correctly. - This is basically a commercial smartwach (the Colmi P8) that is based on a well documented SOC, the nordic nRF52832 - The open source version comes with an enclosure that is not glued shut, so that it is easy to access testpoints on the pcb. - Development is done by accessing the nRF51 SWD interface with pogo pins or similar. The programming interface can be a stan…
There ya go: https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os
and the default https://github.com/JF002/Pinetime
My guess would be that Wasp-OS will become the beginner-friendly fully-featured option while Pinetime will be the more battery friendly option.
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Yeah, the original Apple watch had like half a GB, and a raspberry pi zero ($5 price) has the same. Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?
> Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size? Oh they could have. The problem is: it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you and most of the documentation is under NDA.
That's a really good point. I remember having the Pebble watch (this was pre-Apple and Android watches) and I think it had 128 KB of RAM total, including OS, background tasks, apps, etc. That was a mass produced and commercialized item though.
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Yeah, the original Apple watch had like half a GB, and a raspberry pi zero ($5 price) has the same. Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?
Slapping on a more RAM on the PCB is not free energy-wise. The watch only has a 180mAh battery that needs to provide power for an entire week.
Granted that was an e-paper display. (They had color and black and white options)