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Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

andrewchilds.com

11–20 of 88 posts

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#11

First of all -- awesome! Second, if you aren't aware or in case others are interested, the main dev from the xdrip project released a custom watch as well: https://bluejay.website/ There are some posts on reddit from the dev. (for others -- the watch is available for purchase, and allows integration w/ xdrip). Third --> we've come a long way in a short time. When I was diagnosed I had to collect urine samples and dro…

Yes! The BlueJay watch project is amazing, very encouraging to see that he was able to connect directly to the sensor from the watch with the latest version. Totally agree with you - one of the biggest sources of hope for us in those first few weeks after he was diagnosed was knowing how far the tech had come, and how many huge advancements were in the pipeline.

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#13
Nicely done - it's crazy that you could do this solo and the multi billion dollar device makers haven't been able to do it in many years. Would be a nice peripheral for them to sell along with their CGMs (instead of those old receiver devices that everyone stopped using in favor of smartphones). Wishful thinking, but maybe try to talk to Abbott or Dexcom to see if they will fund another open source production run of these? Output to them could be a report/collection of user feedback to help them w/ product strategy...

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#14
This is really cool. Having gone through some of the same challenges for hobby projects myself (learning Fusion, learning to make a PCB, learning to make the 10th revision of the PCB), you're being quite humble - each one of these things is hard with a steep learning curve.

Awesome work!

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#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 your knowledge, you actually have a very small foothold with which to challenge these chat replies.

Did you also face this on the more HW 'heavy' part of your project? Any tips on how to navigate terra incognita with LLMs?

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#16
> I learned that One Does Not Simply put glass in front of a TFT display. It will look like a first-generation, low-budget Android phone if you do.

Do you happen to have any before-and-after photos of what this looked like, and more details on how your tortilla press DIY method works? I recently received a little hackable music player device with a TFT display that looks kind of bad and I wonder if this is something I can do to make the display look good.

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#18

> I learned that One Does Not Simply put glass in front of a TFT display. It will look like a first-generation, low-budget Android phone if you do. Do you happen to have any before-and-after photos of what this looked like, and more details on how your tortilla press DIY method works? I recently received a little hackable music player device with a TFT display that looks kind of bad and I wonder if this is something…

The process was applying steady pressure to the TFT display -> OCA film -> glass, sandwiched between soft rubber, for about a minute. However you need to do a decent job applying the OCA film in the first place - there are youtube videos that show how to do it.

I probably wouldn't recommend what I did in your case - it's easy to go too far and break the glass, and I'm not sure if what's wrong in your case is due to the OCA film in between the display and the glass.

Re: Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

#20

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
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