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MicroPython Smartwatch

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Re: MicroPython Smartwatch

#4

Post by csmeyer »

I loved programming for Pebble back in the day. They actually had a pretty nice in browser IDE and IIRC their APIs were fairly well documented.

I remember making watch face bitmaps with paint!

Re: MicroPython Smartwatch

#5

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

I tried micropython on an ESP32-S3. On one hand, it's just amazing in a lot of regards. Writing BT with aioble is a breeze (can't say that about ESP-IDF). On the other hand, it's limited. No dual core support, no hardware interrupts, no enums... Dual core support is needed for anything real time at multi-kHz together with BT (BT takes over the core for about half a millisecond when sending anything).

The saving grace is that modifying or adding functionality to micropython is pretty straight forward. It's just a FreeRTOS app, the organization is intuitive, the code is fairly short. Anything performance heavy can be written in C and called from micropython (same idea as torch or numpy).

Re: MicroPython Smartwatch

#6

Post by blt »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #5

I tried micropython on an ESP32-S3. On one hand, it's just amazing in a lot of regards. Writing BT with aioble is a breeze (can't say that about ESP-IDF). On the other hand, it's limited. No dual core support, no hardware interrupts, no enums... Dual core support is needed for anything real time at multi-kHz together with BT (BT takes over the core for about half a millisecond when sending anything). The saving grace…

no hardware interrupts? that seems like a big limitation for a microcontroller environment.

Re: MicroPython Smartwatch

#7

Post by anigbrowl »

Useful info, but I'm not too clear on why you need to flash the watch from a phone as opposed to from your development machine. It was hard to filter out the technical information from the irrelevant asides.

Re: MicroPython Smartwatch

#8

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

blt wrote: post #6
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #5

I tried micropython on an ESP32-S3. On one hand, it's just amazing in a lot of regards. Writing BT with aioble is a breeze (can't say that about ESP-IDF). On the other hand, it's limited. No dual core support, no hardware interrupts, no enums... Dual core support is needed for anything real time at multi-kHz together with BT (BT takes over the core for about half a millisecond when sending anything). The saving grace…

no hardware interrupts? that seems like a big limitation for a microcontroller environment.

It only supports hardware interrupts on some platforms, with some pretty hefty limitations (not being able to allocate memory means that a lot of Python stuff is unavailable). I timed the "soft interrupts", those triggered within 80 or so microseconds IIRC.
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