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Open Source Smartwatch

pine64.org

191–200 of 251 posts

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#191

This is what we (early people in the android wear team) wanted android wear to be, until word from the top came down that "it shall run android, or it shall not exist". The rest is history....

I'm not really familiar with this space, but what did you think it should run? I can't imagine a team building a smartwatch at Google at that time expecting anything other than Android.

I would assume something like one of the RTOSes like what's listed for the PineTime? Seems like it'd be easier to get power consumption low and keep the watch speedy that way, then just interface with a phone, etc., over bluetooth or something.

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#192

After reading what others have said and feedback on PineTime and what a good hackable watch should have, it seems like Pebble should resurrect from the grave as a hackable watch. I mean the pebble time had 128kb ram (this only has 64k ram), an color epaper display, 150mAh battery (over a week battery life), heart rate sensors, etc. Heck its even being supported by the open source community AFTER it was discontinued.…

Pebble's over, sadly. I assume fitbit will want to do something with the assets, why else would they have bought it? (PS: I always wondered what was in it for them actually) I really hope the PineTime will pick up where it left off! But it's only in dev kit stage now.

I had the 1st two generation Pebbles, and now I'm using a Versa Lite. I do find a lot of resemblance on Pebble. Granted it's not open at all and their 'store' is, to me, much less inviting. Yeah not open source at all. However, I also recall that Pebble was looking into Android with their 'Pebble Core'. I do miss their e-ink screen

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#193
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!).

Some GPS receivers claim to get a reading in 2ms, then power down. Even doing that once a second would only have it powered 0.2% of the time. Still quite impressive though. It defies belief getting 2 weeks out of a GPS watch charge.

From my understanding of GNSS (I did some research on it in school, about a month full-time), that only works if you have a clock synchronized to a few nanoseconds and of course up to date satellite information. This is very plausible if you do it once a second, because in 1 second your quartz doesn't drift that much or you can count cpu clock cycles perhaps, and the ephemerides don't change that often.

But once you move indoors and lose signal regularly and have a much higher noise to signal ratio, I very much doubt this can still work. I don't know about you, but I don't work in the garden, so most of the day that GNSS unit would still be listening and calculating (as I understand, the code division multiplexing means you kind of brute force the various codes until one produces a signal instead of noise) and might not even get a fix at all (my phone takes a few minutes next to a window when there is concrete on all sides except for that narrow view of the sky, and this 2018 phone is already orders of magnitude better than my previous Galaxy Note 2 was). I'm not saying it's impossible, but I would highly doubt that it consistently gets a fix in 2ms, or even 200ms, in the place where you spend most of your time.

Of course, it's mostly useless indoors anyway, but so you'd have to manually toggle it every time you go in- or outside, or somehow configure a home location where it turns off (would work great during COVID) if it has such a feature, though I wouldn't know how it would figure out when you've left home in that case. (WiFi comes to mind as an obvious solution, but then how do you explain to the user that it won't track your GPS while that WiFi is in range? It just seems like they'd drop the auto-off feature at this point.)

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#194

I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises. Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back. First…

The best ARM SoC you can currently buy on the open market (without a backroom deal) is a combo A72/A53, which is what Pine64 sells.

If you want to change this, you'd need to either start a semiconductor company, or engineer some sort of coup at one or more of the "most unpleasant to deal with" Silicon vendors (Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc.).

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#195

I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises. Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back. First…

> And now they are releasing a smartwatch with a 64 MHz core and 64 KB of RAM - some specs you would have expected from a very cheap smartwatch released 7-8 years ago

My Xiaomi Mi Band probably has similar specs. I bought it last year. You position this as outdated, but for me, the specs mean that I only have to charge it every couple of weeks.

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#196
post #195

I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises. Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back. First…

> And now they are releasing a smartwatch with a 64 MHz core and 64 KB of RAM - some specs you would have expected from a very cheap smartwatch released 7-8 years ago My Xiaomi Mi Band probably has similar specs. I bought it last year. You position this as outdated, but for me, the specs mean that I only have to charge it every couple of weeks.

Sure, if all you need is a watch that only shows you the time, can support a couple of skins and maybe comes with a basic heart rate monitor, then you probably don't need more. But I wouldn't advertise it (like Pine does) as "you can install any OS on it". I wouldn't even advertise it as a smartwatch TBH. It's more like a tiny embedded device to be worn on a wrist, with specs much more comparable to those of an ESP8266 or a modern Arduino rather than (even the cheapest) RaspberryPi.

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#197
post #194

I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises. Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back. First…

The best ARM SoC you can currently buy on the open market (without a backroom deal) is a combo A72/A53, which is what Pine64 sells. If you want to change this, you'd need to either start a semiconductor company, or engineer some sort of coup at one or more of the "most unpleasant to deal with" Silicon vendors (Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc.).

Well, that's exactly my point when I speak of compromises. If you want to be nude and pure then you go for the A72/A53, well aware that you're selling hardware that is almost a decade old and can't be used as a daily driver today.

Otherwise, as unpleasant as it can be, you have to make a deal with Broadcom/Qualcomm, or get some other vendors to license their ARM chipset to you.

The latter doesn't seem like the end of the world to me TBH. Of course I'd love an ideal world where open architectures like RISC V have taken over and are actually usable, but until we get there usability remains more important than purity - unless you're RMS of course - even if it involves a small "deal with the devil".

I believe that most of the geeks out there love open-source products not much because they work daily with kernels and drivers (if that's the case then the argument for a pure open hardware without hex bloats makes sense), but because of the flexibility that they offer. Because they can install anything that they want on them and aren't prone to abandonware/planned deprecation like many products powered by Google or Apple. But if you don't give them products that they can use as main daily drivers, you'll rarely get enough momentum outside of the small tinker-and-show-off circles.

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#198
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best ARM SoC you can currently buy on the open market (without a backroom deal) is a combo A72/A53, which is what Pine64 sells. If you want to change this, you'd need to either start a semiconductor company, or engineer some sort of coup at one or more of the "most unpleasant to deal with" Silicon vendors (Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc.).

Well, that's exactly my point when I speak of compromises. If you want to be nude and pure then you go for the A72/A53, well aware that you're selling hardware that is almost a decade old and can't be used as a daily driver today. Otherwise, as unpleasant as it can be, you have to make a deal with Broadcom/Qualcomm, or get some other vendors to license their ARM chipset to you. The latter doesn't seem like the end of…

> you're selling hardware that is almost a decade old and can't be used as a daily driver today.

My iPhone 6S is more than 5 years old, and is perfectly usable as a daily driver (and my SO's iPhone 6 is too - it's 6 years old, only runs iOS 12, but still gets security updates and is perfectly usable).

It's fine if on the freedom/performance/up-to-dateness tradeoff, you're not pine64's customer.

Many people are.

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#199
post #194

I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises. Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back. First…

The best ARM SoC you can currently buy on the open market (without a backroom deal) is a combo A72/A53, which is what Pine64 sells. If you want to change this, you'd need to either start a semiconductor company, or engineer some sort of coup at one or more of the "most unpleasant to deal with" Silicon vendors (Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc.).

[deleted]

Re: Open Source Smartwatch

#200
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some GPS receivers claim to get a reading in 2ms, then power down. Even doing that once a second would only have it powered 0.2% of the time. Still quite impressive though. It defies belief getting 2 weeks out of a GPS watch charge.

From my understanding of GNSS (I did some research on it in school, about a month full-time), that only works if you have a clock synchronized to a few nanoseconds and of course up to date satellite information. This is very plausible if you do it once a second, because in 1 second your quartz doesn't drift that much or you can count cpu clock cycles perhaps, and the ephemerides don't change that often. But once you…

I would assume a common use for GPS in a watch is workout tracking, so it gets manually started and stopped when they go for a run. it'd need more time at the start to get a clean fix, but in good conditions could probably get by with short blips.
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