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Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

andrewchilds.com

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Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#21

Post by andrewchilds »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #15

Hi Andrew, amazing work and done for the best of reasons! I see you are replying in the thread, in your closing notes you wrote: > I would not have been able to get past the initial stages without ChatGPT. One of the coolest uses of LLMs for me is indeed exploring a problem domain where I am not a subject matter expert. The problem is if it leads you down a dead end or hallucinates a solution. Then, at the edge of yo…

Lots of trial and error! ChatGPT was sometimes helpful with hardware and electrical engineering questions, sometimes not. Since I would need to wait a while for the next version of the PCB to show up, it was important to check and verify things, but it did help me find my bearings and develop a general understanding of concepts. I learned a lot from open-source reference implementations from similar projects. I was able to get a lot of help while learning the software as well - in this case Fusion 360 and KiCad - though sometimes ChatGPT would invent a setting that should be there but isn't. As long as you have a rapid feedback loop where you're testing and verifying what it's telling you, I don't think you'll ever find yourself very far off course.

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#24

Post by bluesounddirect »

Andrew : Amazing i always love to see the creative T1D projects. i home one day we have a biological cure . Back when the pebble watch was still a relatively new product. someone had an app for it to be a remote display for the dexcom. it required an external nodemcu based microcontroller to be a middleman, but what it did well was run for days off the battery. my wife used one for a long while; the take aways were black and white e-ink displays saved tons of power . pebbles os was good a power mgmt and it's limited features made devs stick yo core functionality not look for new cool extraneous add ons .

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#25

Post by andrewchilds »

nknealk wrote: post #20
bdcravens wrote: post #3

This is great. I do watch my Dexcom on my Apple Watch, but there's times I just want the number, ASAP. I was hoping it'd talk about eliminating the need for the iOS app ("...where he shouldn’t have to run around with a phone strapped to him...") but it sounds like it's just not possible to avoid at least periodic polling. Reading through the product development, I'm curious why you didn't use a dev kit like the Pine…

The G7 pairs directly with an Apple Watch and acts as the primary sync device. Unlike the G6, you don’t get null readings displaying on the watch until you open the app. I have the dexcom widget on my Apple Watch series 10 with a G7 paired with direct to watch and it always displays the current reading

That's great to hear that direct-to-watch pairing leads to a reliable reading. That's a big improvement over where things were a year ago. I am surprised that the watch becomes the primary sync device instead of the phone, but maybe that's not actually a problem in most situations.

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#27

Post by K0balt »

Great project!

Idk if this might be useful or not, but there is a smartwatch platform (bangle.js 2) that uses the NRF52840 chip (extremely low power, solid BLE support, works with Espruino, micro python, arduino, and other IDEs) battery life is around a week, depending on what you run, of course.

The watch includes an always-on color transflective display, GPS, accelerometer , barometer, haptic motor, compass, sound, touchscreen, etc.

You could do firmware from scratch or you could use the onboard OS and write the program as an App.

The watch isn’t distracting, unless you install stuff on it to be distracting. I think your program might be able to be written as a “watch face” so that it would not have to be launched from the launcher, but you could also write firmware for the watch so that it just does what it does period.

It seems to me like this does everything you want, maybe?

I bought a couple of these (2?) years ago for my kids to program on, they have been great!

https://banglejs.com/

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#29

Post by Twirrim »

> First, the Apple Watch (like all Apple products) is too much device for a kid. It ships with so many shiny features and apps and notifications.

It feels like a bit of an under-served market. T-mobile has a smart watch that you can lock down completely during school hours, which we've done with one of my kids (we're avoiding smartphones for now, and she's strangely quite happy with that, I honestly expected more push back.)

Unfortunately, it wouldn't work for T1D situation. I've a relative with T1D and it's been exciting seeing the technology change over the ~10 years since they got their diagnosis.

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