Funny, I actually have an open Pinetime in front of me right now. I use it for my masters thesis and it's a really nice project. If you want to try out some embedded development (that you can actually show to friends who don't aren't developers), I think this is the perfect project.
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 came a phone with a 9-year-old A53 Cortex chipset. Then a tablet with the same outdated chipset. Then a laptop that ships with a Rockchip RK3399 with 4GB of RAM, in an era when 4GB barely suffice to run a browser with a few tabs. 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.
Why should I use a device whose hardware is almost a decade old at the time of purchase? And how do they even expect anyone to actually use these devices as their primary daily drivers, and not as proofs of concept, nice toys to tinker on every now and then or show off to friends?
I understand that Pine wants to use 100% open hardware, and that comes with heavy compromises, but are these compromises worth it?
If you ask even the geekest user out there whether they prefer a device whose source code is 100% pure and doesn't contain any binary blobs, or a device that doesn't start freezing/lagging after a couple of minutes of normal usage, I bet that anyone would opt for the latter.
Sure the Pine devices aren't particularly powerful. But they're not priced as powerful high-end devices. The Pinebook Pro is $199 -- what other thin, metal chassis ultrabook with reasonable display, input devices etc can you get for that price new? This watch is $25, no-one expects it to have monster specs. An older, proven low-power chipset arguably makes things easier for a device to tinker with anyway.
That said, I too would love to see higher specced devices from Pine. An update to the Pinebook with a fancy new ARM chip and 16GB ram would be tempting indeed.
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.
> 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.
If you’re talking about 5-year-old Apple products, the first Apple Watch is also 5 years old and runs at 520 MHz with 512 MB of RAM. I expect it too is usable. But that’s quite a bit different from 64 MHz and 64 KB of RAM.
I wouldn’t be too sure of that. It was slow out of the gate and got progressively worse as time went on; it’s entirely possible that a much slower device might feel more responsive.
That's a kind of a… difficult comparison. The 6S was right when Apple shifted from chips that were highly competitive to chips that were ridiculously overpowered.
If you're making a point about 5-year-old hardware being still useful today, I think you need to reference typical 5-year-old hardware. The 6S was weird (albeit in a good way).
> 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.
You can go more than basic heart rate monitor since you can easily host a single lead ECG sensor with the "decade old" hardware that you are referring to, just like the latest smartwatch from Apple and Samsung. Heck, you can even host a multi-lead ECG sensor that is more capable than the latest smartwatch products from Apple and Samsung with the "decade old" processor. Couple that wearable smartwatch based multi-lead ECG sensor with any latest Android phone then you have a potent and energy efficient ECG system that is probably as good as the most expensive ECG machine at any hospital but powered only by a coin battery! This out-of-hospital gadget based on "decade old" processor is going to be useful to detect heart arrhythmia and ischemia that is the main cause of mortality in the world and capable of detecting pre-symptomatic Covid-19 as well [1].
I know this is a bad cliche, but this "decade old" processor is more powerful than the most powerful PDP-11 systems that have ever existed, that were last sold back in 1990s.
64 MHz is a bit too low, but I think being in that range is the right choice to make, even ignoring cost concerns. The Pebble Time had a 180 MHz processor, and I think as a smartwatch, it was a much better product than the Apple Watch.
When you have a powerful processor like the Apple Watch does, your power draw is pretty high. This is why the Apple Watch only gets 1-2 days of battery life, while the Pebble has 7 days, and the Apple watch just got a display that is always on, while the Pebble has had a always on display since day 1.
Yes the compromise is worth it. These are the best SoCs available on the open market. If we aspire to more open and repairable devices then we need to start somewhere, and we have to put our money where our mouth is. If volume goes up we get better open products. Luckily Pine64 is doing really well so much so that non geeks are buying their products (with all the software support problems that come with them)
I bought a pinebook pro and i have some SBCs. The PBP is perfect travel laptop with long battery life that can run on my phone charger. Firefox runs buttery smooth on Manjaro i3.
The Librem project got me really interested when it was released. But after reading many reviewes that complained about its usability (it seems that they haven't even bothered to make GTK apps fit on a small screen, and even charging and battery duration had macroscopic issues) I've decided to wait until the next iteration.
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 standard SWD interface such as an STLink clone
Ok, sounds easy enough. It should be possible to just buy one of those smartwatches and crack them open? But OTOH the developer version is not much more expensive.
The main question is now: What software to run on it, that goes beyond a few experiments? Is there any kind of open source smartwatch OS that would run on this?
Edit: Corrected typo, of course I meant SWD interface, not SWM. (SWM or rather SWIM is for STM8)
With that, you can write Go code which (when compiled) is then flashed to the watch for running directly on the hw. No need for an OS layer underneath.
> It should be possible to just buy one of those smartwatches and crack them open?
Could the way that they're sealed become a problem? Description says waterproof glue will be involved in the final version and seem a bit unclear about whether it'll have any mechanical interlock [0]. Sounds like one might have a hard time putting it back together...
I think GP means the SWD interface, which is a standard ARM programming/debugging connector.
I would advise against the ST-Links though as they expose a more high level protocol and don't always work with non-STM chips.
FT232H dongles make for a more versatile programmer.
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.
Maybe Fitbit can be petitioned to make the Pebble's hardware fully open source too.
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
It wasn't eink! But low-power transmissive LCD. Best of both worlds IMO, faster refresh rate and still super low power.
I was a backer of the original pebble too.. It's a shame things didn't work out. I think they just grew too quickly and got caught up in too much investment money wanting too quick returns.
I have it! Pretty fun to play with, although I am not experienced in C++ so have not been able to make it do super useful things yet. It is also quite fiddly - I think it would take quite a lot of work for it to be useful as a daily driver.
Here are some useful starting points if you want to play with it:
I've been using ESP8266es and ESP32s for years and Lua isn't really that popular. The original NodeMCU did come with Lua, but I've never used it (I just flashed something else as soon as I got them) and I don't know of many people using it either.
I'd say that MicroPython is more popular than Lua at this point.
ESP32 in deep sleep modes is reasonably battery friendly (all depending on your frame of reference, of course.) 5uA in RTC-only and 10+ uA in RTC+ULP sleep.
Presumably for a watch use case, you'd plan to deep sleep (ULP) or hibernate (RTC) 98+% of every minute and turn the radios on as infrequently as you could stand to get external notifications. I don't need split-second precision on my notifications if the alternative is a much longer battery life.
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.)
This might be more up my alley because of WiFi. The only reason I'd want a wearable is to be able to put down my phone but still get notifications(and maybe reply to messages) and Bluetooth's range limits that. But honestly, I hate wearing watches.
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 of this watch with more ram.
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.
Do you state that it has its own display RAM or doesn't it?
240x240 is ~56.25 kB at 8 bpp. the screen is RGB 65K colors, that is, 16 bpp; so the framebuffer size should be twice larger. I assume that the display controller has its own memory. True, you would need another 112,5 kB for double-buffering, but maybe you can do without it.
I would pay so much for a hackable watch like this with a 3 or 4 color epaper display, I'd almost pay as much as an apple watch if it was high quality hardware and had a great open API and toolchain.
Go on ebay and purchase a Pebble Time. Color epaper display, fully hackable even after being discontinued thanks to the dev community who continues to update it with "Rebble" the open source version of the OS it ran on.
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?
It's a microcontroller rather than an application chip - so the amount of RAM will always be significantly less. A really beefy high end microcontroller might have 1MB of internal RAM - and for most applications that's more than enough.
> 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.
> it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you
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.
I mentioned in another comment about how I had the Pebble watch (before Apple and Android watches were a thing) and it had 128 kb ram total, but it lasted 11 days. That thing was a beast, but as someone else mentioned cost is a. big consideration too. It had 150 mAh on the newer models, before it was discontinued, so while I'm sure it definitely eats up energy I think it's definitely possible to fit more RAM in the power constraints.
Granted that was an e-paper display. (They had color and black and white options)
I’m not so sure if this is significant other than for the fact that it’s being distributed by PINE64. There are plenty other junk reprogrammable “smartwatch kit” that reuse Huami/Xiaomi-brand smartwatch enclosures while genuine Huami goes on to collect data more strategically at a larger scale.
Recently I got a Mi Band 5 and learned they transfer BLE pairing over platforms - they make devices generate new MAC when unpaired, which is tied to Huami account upon pairing. Gives me different chills than the fact that its sole purpose is to take my health data anyway.
>junk reprogrammable “smartwatch kit” that reuse Huami/Xiaomi-brand smartwatch enclosures
This strikes me a really over the top expression of contempt which just isn't necessary or constructive at all. I generally understand Pine64 products to be developed to the point that they are capable of being used by end-users from day one without hacking or fiddling, are basically ready-to-order in the same way as any commercicial product but with a general understanding that they were hacked together, and may require the kind of hacking that only enthusiasts are interested in doing over the medium to long term. To my mind that is enough to elevate it above junk (are there other distributors comparable to Pine64 that I don't know about?), and I feel that it's quite strange that that should even have to be debated at all.
>while genuine Huami goes on to collect data more strategically at a larger scale.
You're saying that as though it's a good thing, which I don't understand.
>Gives me different chills than the fact that its sole purpose is to take my health data anyway.
I have a Mi Band 5, and wanted to use GadgetBridge instead of the official Mi Fit or Amazfit/Zepp app.
I was surprised to learn this was not easy to do. I needed to retrieve the Bluetooth MAC from the proprietary app via rooted app, or by logging in via script, which no layman would do.
The watch is now paired with GadgetBridge, but the steps are hard enough to dissuade anyone from trying it.
> I have a Mi Band 5, and wanted to use GadgetBridge instead of the official Mi Fit or Amazfit/Zepp app.
> I was surprised to learn this was not easy to do. I needed to retrieve the Bluetooth MAC from the proprietary app via rooted app, or by logging in via script, which no layman would do.
> The watch is now paired with GadgetBridge, but the steps are hard enough to dissuade anyone from trying it.
There is now also an android app to fetch the key and gps almanac, very simple to do, no root or python required.
Note: I kivy wrapped and apk packaged the above mentioned script.
I got a MiBand 3 (because it was cheap) and most of the bluetooth functionality has been reverse engineered -- but you have to search across multiple sources to get the 'complete picture'.
I like Pine64's spirit, but are they good at delivery? I was excited by the PineTab and wanted to buy a few for wall-mounted displays. But they've been out of stock for 6 months at least, with very spotty updates. It made me reluctant to buy anything from them.
The folks at Pine64 are amazingly transparent about what they are working on and the state of their products, but you have to follow their monthly blog posts to see that. I believe they have been having massive issues around display sourcing that have kept a few of their products out of stock for most of this year. Where they don’t have that specific issue, they are reliable.
If someone from there reads this, I'd suggest also updating the product page with a clear statement. Right now it just says "Estimate dispatch in late July, 2020", which makes it look abandoned.
I think GPS is a significant cost in the power budget. Many users would prefer longer battery life. The option to enable GPS would be nice, but it cuts into cost and size budgets.
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!).
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.)
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.
Ah, I guess it shows that I'm no fitness tracker user! I didn't realize you would already interact with the device to indicate you're starting an activity. Yep, in that case this is very plausible, and on startup it probably takes only a few seconds of continuous searching if you have as good a receiver as the 2ms claim indicates.
It is possible to do the GPS processing after the fact. You turn on the rx and listen for a few hundred milliseconds, then turn off. This is very low power. Later you push these to a server (a smartphone or the cloud) which computes the position. This is called snapshot processing.
So if you don't need the position in real time for navigation it is quite possible to track location over a week with a tiny battery. This could be time triggered and/or based on MEMs counters (which are also power friendly). Or you could calculate locally if the user explicitly asks.
Cheap, sleek, waterproof, gorilla glass always-on display, battery lasts a month, does GPS tracking without smartphone connection and you can sync it via Gadgetbridge to keep all your data private without any account/cloud services.
I'm pretty sure they do; even established stores have started carrying them around here. Check out the website as well; there's a bunch of variations of that watch now.
I have the original Bip and am very satisfied with the hardware (lasts forever, looks pretty good) and somewhat satisfied with the software (good selection of watch faces, it's gadgetbridge compatible, but activity mode is a tad bit too easy to enter and too hard to exit)
you can modify the behavior of the crown button to disable this, if i recall correctly. i think i just deactivated it - after one too many accidental presses.
As cyclist, the best option would be to have an hackable cycling pc with speedometer, hearth rate monitor, cadence and power meter.
You can create then a bunch of applications for better training.
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.
I've been loving my COROS. It's quite simple, and the battery life is astonishing. No music functionality though, if that's a dealbreaker for you. I got the APEX 42mm about 5 months ago.
I'm in the market for a similar smart watch/fitness tracker and have settled on the Garmin Vivoactive 4. It hits the sweet spot between a sports watch and a fitness tracker for me, plus the battery should last about a week between charges.
Agreed. I moved from smart watches back to an old Casio sgw-100. Battery life is the main reason. It's nice just to always have a watch that works, and be able to go on camping trips and really be able to rely on the device.
I've changed the battery once in 2 years (and that was simply preventative). The fact that it just keeps on working for years at a time is a nice contrast to basically every other modern device.
Highly recommend the so-called "hybrid" smart watches from Fossil, Withings, etc. The're analog watches with a minimal digital display and all the basic functionality of a smart watch. But since they don't waste power on a big color screen, wifi, or other extravagance, battery life is on the order of a month.
I love mine. I get my notifications, pulse, step, and sleep tracking, in a classy looking package with a grown up battery life.
I got one (Fossil) as well. I love to have the e-ink off, that way it looks like a classic watch. Disadvantage is you cannot put Bluetooth off. I really don't want it on, unless when I specifically turn it on. I probably want a kill switch for it. Which Pebble had.
E-Ink is great, but the main point about it is reflectivity/transflectivity (optional backlight), right? You can do that with LCDs, right (see mentioned smartwatched)?
Sure, the image quality isn't super amazing, but it displays color, uses super little energy and still updates quickly. That's pretty much my point.
The HiSense Q5 is a tablet with a transflective display, but for some reason that is black and white.
so you have about 818 hours (=34 days) of CPU time, but you need to take display current out of that budget too, and an easy source for that probably exists, but I can't find easily.
There are plenty of smartwatches with heart rate monitoring that have a week of battery life and 180mAh is enough for 10 days on some of them. It's obviously not enough if you're playing music or video or something like that. But if you're primarily using the device to give you notifications, heart rate, and the time, it seems likely it does last all week.
it's running a low power nrf52. they can last a year on a coin cell battery, with adequate power optimisations. without an always on display, a week is possibly an underestimation.
for example, see the amazfit bip, it has lasted me ~45 days which even has a (low power) always on display.
i still forget to charge my pebble time steel sometimes cos it lasts long enough for that to happen. I don't need to pack a charger for it on short trips, weekends, etc.
I prefer it that way. would not want to charge yet another device every day or every other day.
Is it just me or is the screen not vertically centered on this device? Also the wake up button is on the left instead of the right, probably gets woken up a lot by hitting the sleeve of a coat or buttoned shirt...
These might be nitpicks but just because it's open source doesn't excuse it from poor design critique.
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.
I highly recommend the compatible Colmi P8 smartwatch with waspos https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os which enables you to write micropython with access to all device features.
You can overwrite the stock firmware using bluetooth without having to open and solder wires.
I dont know what the notification features are with the stock firmware and TBH it is a hit and miss affair with all devices and you have to do plenty of research before buying.
The device I quoted is ripe for hacking and currently the waspos firmware is a blank slate for anyone to create custom watch software.
I would totally buy it if I could order it locally in Europe.
When I ordered a PinePhone from Hong Kong, it was just too much of a hassle for my liking. Waiting for an indefinite amount of time until it gets shipped and then deal with customs.
I wonder how many customers there are per country. Would it make sense to have local distributors around the world?
These new stores will offer a higher standard of customer service, but the products will also be priced higher. The original community Pine Store will remain available in its current form.
I bought the Pinecil (temp-controlled soldering iron running on a RISC-C micro) and had no problems. Customs was ~$15 and fully automated (Sweden). Got it delivered in our mail box.
>Waiting for an indefinite amount of time until it gets shipped and then deal with customs.
I got my Pinebook from Hong Kong and was stunned at how quick it came. I was expecting a month or two, and if memory serves it was closer to a just a couple of weeks.
I wonder why phones are more of a hassle to order from Hong Kong than laptops?
It’s not a special beast. Everything I’ve ordered from there has some issues with shipping (maybe the rock boards are better). But honestly, that’s to be expected and they make no claims to the contrary. Hopefully the shift to a commercial store will make this better.
This is really cool. $25 is quite impressive too. A GPS would be killer though.
But doesn't quite scratch the itch that I've got for a higher level open source wearable or tablet (think IP67 Raspberry Pi tablet or watch) The key is that like this watch, the hardware is done and "consumer" ready.
The pine tab is a table available from the same site. I'm looking at it, but it isn't ready for someone with my limited hacking time - yet (I expect this to change in a few months)
That depends on where you buy. If you buy a Dell UltraSharp you can expect that there will be no dead pixels. But that's not because Dell has technology that completely prevents them, it's because Dell has good QC. If you buy a cheap screen from a manufacturer that does less QC you might seldomly have stuck pixels. And of course there are the bottom-of-the-barrel suppliers that buy whatever other suppliers discard because of QC defects. There's always someone who will buy a screen with a couple dead pixels if it's half the price.
I don't know where pine falls, I would guess they buy straight from the factory without extensive QC and might seldomly have stuck pixels.
Yes. It's luckily rare-ish to actually happen nowadays, and expectations have become stricter, but many vendors do have policies that state that some amount of pixel defects are tolerable, this is not out of the ordinary. Although they do typically distinguish between pixels that stay lit and pixels that are dead, the former being more annoying and thus less acceptable. E.g. a policy might say that a screen of size X can have max 4 dark pixels and only 1 permanently lit that's somewhere at the edge of the screen, and no lit ones in the center.
GPS enables distance tracking of runs that aren’t on tracks. It could also allow turn by turn navigation if this thing had an sd card slot (4mb of storage isn’t going to carry many maps).
You could also use it as a bike speedometer or a running pace monitor.
(Though, the battery may be too small for all these use cases.)
A couple KB should be enough for turn-by-turn navigation if you plan the route on a smartphone and then upload the map of the route and immediate area to the watch. You really only need a graph of GPS waypoints that you can navigate between
After using a pebble time round since it came on the market, I really value the 4 physical buttons (back) on the left vs (up/select/down) on the right. I have never used a watch with a touch screen function, but I read oppinions of the watches made by fitbit after they aquired pebble, that it was a mix of touch screen and buttons.
letting this have both technologies while being open source leaves a lot of room for developers I would imagine. But leaning onto what I read about those 3button fitbit watches I hope there will be a future version with 4 buttons.
Weirdly enough, I prefer the more "toy-like" Pebble buttons to the more "solid-looking" Pebble Time ones : they are easier to find without looking, and easier to press.
Having had both, the Pebble buttons got a bit gummy over time whereas the Pebble Time buttons are still very solid. The latter seem more well put-together, IMO.
The Pebble 2 SE buttons are known to fade off eventually. There's a hardware mod (3D printer) which requires orig. Pebble Classic buttons to fix it. Unfortunately, I broke my Pebble 2 SE in the process. Its very delicate hardware.
I ended up buying a Fossil Hybrid HR instead. Its a decent watch, just a tad expensive.
The cost is crazy low. Any insight on if this will function as a standard smartwatch (ie buzz for alerts) out of the box, or do I need to write my own bluetooth driver for this to be useful?
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.
I have been using a Amaze Bipfit with Gadget bridge for the past few months. It helped me get my sleep back on track and my fitness levels back to a baseline. Previously I had a Basis and I really miss the galvanic skin response sensor and the temperature sensor. There are not any devices that work with Gadgetbridge, let alone anything on the market I trust using that has these two additional sensors, which allows be to see triggers in stress beyond the heart rate.
Hats off to the Pine folks for having a smartwatch, but for God's sake if they are going to develop their own devices from the ground up please include a temp sensor at the least.
Does anybody actively use smartwatch? I remember I bought the first Google pay smartwatch Mobvi Ticwatch Pro.
Used it once to pay for dinner and jogging a few times and found it to be not useful as I keep going back to my smartphone which I am not keen to carry while exercising.
I'm hoping that Smartglasses won't be a flop but can't help but feel we are no in a plateau of really incremental innovations moving the screen from desktop to our pockets now to our wrists, our glasses and perhaps if Elon gets his way our brains in the future.
Still would want one tho as it appears it is very light unlike many major brand ones that seem so bulky and large on my tiny wrists
Lots of Apple Watches and a decent number of Garmin watches. Don't see a lot of anything else. I suspect the fact most of them are bulky and have shitty CPU options is a big part of it. Garmin users are willing to accept the bulk for the functionality. Apple Watches aren't that bulky.
I use mine for workouts, taking calls so I don't have to pull out my phone, sending text & receiving text messages, and controlling music. For my light mobile phone use, it's nearly suitable as a replacement for my phone.
All the time. I use it to read texts (a lot of time they don't require a reply, they're just informational). Set timers. Check the weather before I head out. Track my workouts. Listen to music. Log meals. And I don't carry my phone with me when I'm working out, so sometimes I take calls on it.
I so want to move to a standalone smartwatch and not have to carry a phone. I need nfc payment with a bank supporting the whatever (Google Pay or something), GPS with a maps app, LTE with support for whatsapp and calls + sms and bluetooth for wireless buds for calls. Don't even need music. Maybe I could even skip NFC payment by having a slot to insert a cut contactless credit card although I like the extra security of having to unlock the device to use Google Pay. I only wish Android smartwatches supported whatsapp voice message sending and weren't so slow to the point of being unusable
The crux of the issue will probably continue to be battery technology, for a while. The latest Apple Watches have basically everything you already want, including GPS & Cellular. They're not designed to be master devices though, since the watch formfactor is really hard to get much done on without some sort of master device for login, etc. Longer and more intensive use (more mapping, more calls) would probably kill the battery in nothing flat. While they're really good smart watches, they already struggle to keep up with the cpu/power/battery tradeoffs that are required for even a reasonable 1-day life.
Some basic things you wouldn't expect, like crypto for HTTPS, take a LOT of work on a tiny wrist-mounted CPU.
Doesn’t the 4G Apple Watch support all of your requirements? I suppose if you had to a buy an iPhone to set it up that could be a substantial investment but an iPhone 6S would do the job.
But switching OS environment is a bigger issue than the price.
If you e.g. depend on more "hackability" like Tasker app you would be in a big surprise on iOS.
Cool project. I'm starting to become a fan of dual core BLE SoCs though. One small M0 to handle the BLE stack (which typically has to be high priority) and one M4 for the application.
I wish smartwatch templates adopt more multiple programmable buttons. Nice to have a functional media remote during winter with gloves on. Pepple got so much right.
Might want to look at an Amazfit bip paired with Gadgetbridge. Gadgetbridge can export sleep, heartrate, and exercise data. It exports as a db though I have yet to fool around with it or with my raw data.
But probably even if it had it it wouldn't work with Google/Apple Pay, for me payments using my watch would be the best application of "smart" together with notifications.
This is the frustrating thing about integrating with payment systems, it's far out of reach for a FOSS project like this.
Cryptocurrencies are better in that regard but few businesses accept cryptocurrencies, GNU Taler would also be better but I think that requires banks to be on board with it which they're also unlikely to do.
The card-side implementation of NFC payments is surprisingly resource hungry for parasitic powered NFC chip, but utterly negligible for a device with own battery, 64MHz ARM core and 4MB of storage.
On the other hand good luck with getting such a device accepted by anyone in the financial industry. (On the other hand you probably could build something that proxies to your real physical card)
I'm not aware of anybody reproducing the exact softdevice design, but there are open source BLE stacks out there that run on the nRF528xx family, for example:
Not really. Tizen wouldn't work on a small low-power and low-RAM bluetooth SoC like the NRF52 this watch has. Tizen requires iirc a minimum of 512MB or 256 MB for "Tizen light". So: different focus, much bigger SoC and RAM, much shorter battery time.
Open-source is still maturing in the "smart" area. The phones are getting a lot better all the time and I think we'll see more watches in the next couple of years
There's still a long way to go before it's viable for the average tech-geek to go for a fully open-source setup (phone, watch, tablet, etc), so if your question is if it's good now, then no
If you're asking if this will turn into something good over time, then yes... A million times yes
The open-source space will most likely always come with its own set of problems and I don't think we'll ever get an environment that has the same level of seamlessness as android or iOS.
I'm hoping the next 2-3 years will get us to a point where open source can get a user 80% of the way out-of-the-box, at which point I'm definitely ready to ditch android and move everything to an environment, that's built to respect my privacy
The main problem currently is the lack of a good open source firmware with complete hardware support, but the community is growing and soon we should see some interesting things:
Are you complaining about the lack of a walled garden on a post titled "open source smart watch"?
Yes, open source leads to experimentation and individualization which leads to fragmentation. It's a trade-off, but and there are already plenty of other smart watches going for a less fragmented but less open ecosystem
Why do you expect them to restrict what you can put on it (i.e. enforce a single OS), when the point seems to be for people to do whatever they want with it?
