Open source smartwatch integrates ESP32 MCU with e-paper display

https://linuxgizmos.com/open-source-smartwatch-integrates-esp32-mcu/

by teleforce • 3 years ago

113 96 3 years ago

tiernano• 3 years ago

thats very cool! If I had found this about 2 months back, I would have bought this over my Fitbit Sense 2!

tectec• 3 years ago

I'd love a watch like this, but none of them seem to work with iOS. I don't know if sideloading iOS apps would help with that. Apple seems to keep the messaging and notification API's pretty locked down.

Steltek2• 3 years ago

The list of hobbies, ideas, and stuff in my house that will never work with Apple is endless. Once you choose Apple, you stop getting more choices.

solarkraft7• 3 years ago

I don't know if sideloading iOS apps would help with that.

Likely. You currently need to do just that to install the Pebble app and it's a huge pain.

kkoste• 3 years ago

I wonder what the battery life would be on this. But I am too lazy to do the math.

crims0n2• 3 years ago

Covered on the Wiki, 5-7 days normally, 2-3 days with WiFi: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/battery-life

epilys• 3 years ago

I get 24 hours tops without wifi. Huh?? I thought it was normal, will contact support.

crote• 3 years ago

It is a cute watch, but Micro USB is inexcusable in 2023. Especially at that price point: £57 is $70 or €64.

schwartzworld• 3 years ago

Micro USB is fine. Most people have a ton of them around, and they are cheaper than USBC. You enjoy paying a premium to not have to look at which direction you're plugging it in?

blitzar• 3 years ago

You enjoy paying a premium to not have to look at which direction you're plugging it in?

For that alone it is worth every single one of the 7c extra it costs.

stronglikedan• 3 years ago

Abso-effin-lutely!

Findecanor• 3 years ago

Cables with reversible Micro USB plugs exist. Those are the only ones I use.

fxtentacle2• 3 years ago

Fully agree. An USB-C connector is thinner and even at low volume I can buy them for $0.04 each. And if you buy a full 1600 piece reel its $0.02 each. Plus you NEED USB-C if you want support for USB-PD (power delivery) or USB-BC (battery charging) because both standards rely on the CC lines that A- or B-type connectors lack.

sprash2• 3 years ago

I have one of those. It takes a lot of work writing embedded C code to make it do what you want. In my case it was displaying a calendar and the moonphase. The default software is very bare bones. Battery life is 1.5 weeks for me when using ntp sync once a Day and a display update every minute without any further wireless communication.

I find the PineTime more attractive because it has an aditional heart rate sensor and a color display with similiar battery life.

daneel_w2• 3 years ago

The schematic shows an RTC in there, does it really need to have its timekeeping syncronized every day next to startup?! Or it's just something you do to cover for eventualities?

sprash2• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but the RTC lags about a minute every three days. At least for my device a regular ntp sync is therefore absolutely required.

charlesrocket• 3 years ago

Some v1 units got defective RTCs so one would have to frequently sync time. My version had around 2 weeks of battery life (no ntp/etc). I can see getting way beyond that with accel and on-demand refresh instead of 1min intervals.

boffinAudio4• 3 years ago

I have one of these, alongside a couple of PineTimes, some ESP32-vending machine clone 'smart watches', and even an Oscilloscope Watch, which uses the same CPU.

Alas Watchy looks great on screen and in pictures, but on the wrist it is very bulky and uncomfortable. I would not rate the case design very high.

I much prefer my PineTime Watch instead, its just a nicer form-factor. And it has an app store with tons of interesting stuff.

One thing I wish these open source watches would do: agree on an API/ABI that would allow us to run apps from PineTime on Bangle, and vice versa.

Someone should put Lua on all these machines and let us side-load bytecode, darn ..

EDIT: s/PrimeTime/PineTime/g

seszett• 3 years ago

PrimeTime Watch

Do you mean PineTime, or is there a "PrimeTime" smartwatch that I don't know about?

boffinAudio4• 3 years ago

Sorry, thats a typo - yes I meant the PineTime Watch. I'll edit ..

solarkraft7• 3 years ago

One thing I wish these open source watches would do: agree on an API/ABI that would allow us to run apps from PineTime on Bangle, and vice versa.

I've looked far and wide for a standard embedded OS that can just load binaries and didn't find much. IIRC Zephyr has a seemingly barely-supported feature for it and so does NuttX.

boffinAudio4• 3 years ago

Yeah, Zephyr seems closest to giving us this ideal, but I still honestly believe that Lua is the solution - this way we don't need loading/runtime linking, etc.

Of course, this requires planning.

bmsleight_• 3 years ago

Same here - loved Watchy, built my own watchface. But it is not waterproof and kill a couple of Watchy(s) in the sea/shower. PineTime is not as good and harder to hack and contribute back to the firmware. But Pinetime is waterproof.

tyingq• 3 years ago

I'm pleasantly surprised the case itself manages to be ~ 15mm thick, which isn't exactly thin, but not bad. And it looks like there's opportunity to shave that down with different connectors, sinking the battery into the pcb, etc, as they iterate.

fxtentacle2• 3 years ago

About 2 years ago, me and some friends produced a small batch of similar watches, but we used a different LiPo connector and USB-C to make it thinner and then we could get the cases down to 11mm thickness, which is comparable to the thinnest Apple Watch. So in general, ESP32 and e-ink is a pretty great basis to start from. Since this appears to be open source, you could, in theory, apply these modifications to their design and then produce your own batch of thin e-ink watches... If you do, please send them a pull request ;)

crims0n2• 3 years ago

Really surprised someone has not filled the gap that Pebble left. Projects like this get close, but it still boggles my mind that over a decade ago we had a polished and commercial e-ink smartwatch with a 1-week battery life, 5 atm waterproof rating, integration with Android and iOS, a vibrant developer community, and a robust app store... and it all just, disappeared.

crimsoneer• 3 years ago

Yeah, it's a pretty clear market failure in my book. I still find the whole saga pretty mystifying.

theaussiestew• 3 years ago

Would you buy an e-ink smartband if it came out?

Steltek2• 3 years ago

My Pebble watch and my dumb-as-bricks LCD TV. Elegant simplicity of a past generation that I can't let go of today because the modern replacement sucks.

There's gotta be other things that fall in that category. 3.5mm headphones? Cars with tactile controls? Non-electric bicycles?

ThrowawayR2• 3 years ago

"* 3.5mm headphones?*"

Sure as heck aren't those. While I still want a physical connector, jiggling the cable to get a good connection when the jack started wearing out is something that should have been put it in its grave long ago.

wwweston2• 3 years ago

3.5mm headphones?

Yes. For over 30 years, consumer electronics had a Just Works™ standard for stereo audio. No pairing issues. No charging issues. No dongles for different devices.

For some situations (jogging, gym, housework, etc) I get that no-wires is also convenient, but others (like the car) make no damn sense, and even the situations where it does make sense aren't a reason to remove the feature.

But we did it anyway because it makes Apple more money.

derekp7• 3 years ago

Digital Cable / TV. It used to be that you could sit back with the remote and flip through the channels to find something good on. Now it takes a few seconds for the next channel to "start up" that you can't quickly scan through them. Oh, and the proliferation of "junk" channels on cable means that you still couldn't channel surf because of all the crap you have to wade through, and the half dozen channels out of several hundred that might have a show you are interested in is more likely than not to have a commercial running when you land on it.

Yes, we have more choice with more channels, and streaming, and independent media, but I'd almost rather have limited choice of higher quality than to have a choice of thousands of "meh" options.

tonymet2• 3 years ago

this comment deserves a [Ask HN] post. There is a huge untapped market for tactile, responsive, simplified & elegant products / tools / appliances / vehicles. We just need to articulate & define the market segment well. “Responsive Utility” or “Full Control Appliances” . Unfortunately the positive qualities of “simple, long lasting, “ and to a lesser degree “intuitive” are presently lost to many/ most consumers.

My dream would be resurrecting 1990s mazda with 3 models: the hatchback, 90s-size pickup truck , and the miata. All tactile control interior. Modern drivetrain efficiency ( direct injection, variable timing) . Primitive ICs (just air/ fuel mix, ABS, and minimal ODB-II features) .

There is a huge market of guys who just want usable, long-lasting, responsive & intuitive tools

solarkraft7• 3 years ago

Most importantly: Buttons.

I'm still wearing mine.

opan• 3 years ago

This. I got a PineTime and after using it a while I realized it will never be as good as the Pebble because they didn't put enough buttons on the thing. Touchscreens suck for this kind of device. The software is still catching up as well, but at least that might get good enough someday. I'd like to see something with as many buttons as a Pebble get Infinitime support.

m-p-32• 3 years ago

I live in a country where it's sub-zero almost 4 months in the year. being able to control the watch with physical buttons without taking of my gloves is underrated.

I enjoy my BangleJS2, but the tactile display feels like a downgrade to my Pebble Time Steel 4 buttons.

PragmaticPulp• 3 years ago

Pebble had a small but vocal audience. Their audience is price conscious, picky about features being exactly what they want, and relatively hard to please (despite the simplicity of their expectations).

It’s not a good recipe for building a company around. Probably best for someone doing a hobby-scale or deliberately small business, but establishing manufacturing and logistics for a hardware project is notoriously expensive.

Meanwhile, engineer compensation expectations have gone up a lot since the Pebble days. Just think about how many Pebble watches you’d have to sell to be able to support even one engineer salary. Multiple that across a team big enough to do everything needed to ship a Pebble watch that satisfies their audience and it’s not hard to see why it’s not happening.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, engineer compensation expectations have gone up a lot since the Pebble days.

Rents have gone up since pebble days. Not just engineers, everyone needs to be paid more today.

The housing crisis is eating civilisation

tpoacher2• 3 years ago

"small but vocal audience" is a rather misleading statement when you consider it refers to a company within its first year of operations. As far as I remember there were as many pebbles as applewatches around that time, even though apple was an established company with significant clout.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

Try Withings

It lasts a week on battery, shows time mechanicaly, records hearbeat and usual accelerometer/sleep/wtv.

Not as advanced as Garmin/others, but its neater and simpler.

The timepiece functionality lasts a month without charging. Here being a watch comes first, bells and whistles are secondary

tpoacher2• 3 years ago

"disappeared"

you mean bought and killed

tesseract• 3 years ago

It was already dead when it was bought. The founder wrote a postmortem: https://medium.com/@ericmigi/why-pebble-failed-d7be937c6232

michaelmior2• 3 years ago

I personally really like my Xiaomi Mi Band. It's much cheaper than many alternatives (Apple Watch, Wear OS devices) at <$50USD for the most current model. I get notifications pushed from my phone, step tracking, heart rate monitoring, sleep detection, among other things. Battery life is multiple weeks and it's waterproof (not sure to what pressure).

It's not as customizable as I'd like, but Notify for Mi Band[0] helps a lot. For example, I'm able to connect my watch to Home Assistant so I can use watch controls for my smart home devices.

[0] https://mibandnotify.com/

dirtyid• 3 years ago

This, low effort Chinese smart band/watchess with 2-3 week battery life that does 80% works well for my use case. Upgraded to a huawei GT because it has 1 physical short cut button I use to pull up media controls. IMO that's really what's missing, a simple band with 4-6 programmable buttons.

dariosalvi78• 3 years ago

well, there's BangleJS, but no e-ink display

hooverd• 3 years ago

I had two Pebble 2s. They were both great watches but both lost their silicone button covers to wear. Can you even buy replacements for that anymore?

m-p-32• 3 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't offer some subscription-based extra features to have a steady flow of revenue instead of only depending on hardware sale.

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

I believe Garmin ticks all the boxes, depending on your definitions of "vibrant" and "robust" at the end there.

I had a Pebble, which I really enjoyed, but my Garmin 945 is much better at everything I actually wanted the Pebble to do (and much more).

I honestly don't actually care about third party apps, because the device does everything I want it to without them.

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

Would be nice if it had some spare IO pins broken out so you could add your own sensors etc.

analog31• 3 years ago

I discovered much to my chagrin that the ESP32 Bluetooth module consumes a lot of power, affecting my quirky keyboard project. Is there a better method for syncing to a PC or phone?

solarkraft7• 3 years ago

If it's the actual radio: No. But if you want to optimise the time spent active (where most of the gains are), ESP-Now and BLE would be good options (though I suppose you're already using that?). Aside from that, NRF and Silabs chips have very low power radios with advanced features (advertising while the rest of the chip is sleeping).

DrThunder2• 3 years ago

Eh, as a hobby and something to mess around with I can see the novelty of this. However, the main reason I use a smartwatch is for the gps (typically I have a Garmin). I track my mountain bike rides, hikes, runs etc.

Personally, I would just use an analog watch over something like this. It seems to not be "smart" enough to actual be all that useful.

capableweb• 3 years ago

Yeah, I don't think this product (SQFMI Watchy - https://thepihut.com/products/sqfmi-watchy) is sold as a thing for consumers to just buy and passively use without being curious about the platform itself and wanting something to hack on.

And the seeing what the sources (linuxgizmos.com and thepihut.com) are, kind of makes that point clear too, together with the fact that it comes in pieces you have to assemble yourself.

A bit like commenting on a story about a new gaming laptops when all you use the Office suite and you don't see the value in the laptop presented.

LeifCarrotson• 3 years ago

You want OpenSmartwatch-gps:

https://open-smartwatch.github.io/watches/gps-edition/

https://github.com/Open-Smartwatch/open-smartwatch-gps

Admittedly somewhat abandonware due to difficulties in antenna design... A year ago, I enthusiastically jumped on the project and I've got a half dozen ESP32-pico-D4 and Quectel L96 GPS modules on my desk, a breakout board for one GPS module that only works with a powered antenna that's twice the size of my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, and a half-finished Kicad project to turn it into a watch, a very dusty RF design textbook that I've not read since 2011, and not enough time or energy to see it through.

solarkraft7• 3 years ago

Why does almost nobody use the Sharp Memory LCDs the Pebble Time used? They're close to perfect. The only other product with them I can think of is the Amazfit Bip/Banglejs.

addaon• 3 years ago

Sharp even has some nice round color memory LCDs at this point, that still stay under 1 mA even at 20 fps, and are way under that for once-per-second updates. Besides the usual memory LCDs downside (25:1 contrast is truly bad, need a side-light for many use cases just like old-school digital watches did), I suspect the color reproduction is muddy as best. I'd still love one for a few use cases.

daneel_w2• 3 years ago

"With only time keeping, Watchy should have a battery life of 5-7 days, while with fetching data over WiFi, it should last between 2-3 days."

No thanks, that would be too vexing. Though I do see the attractive novelty of this device.

polishdude20• 3 years ago

Wireless connectivity is great but the esp32 has terrible power consumption due to the wifi.

A lot of times you can get by with Bluetooth. Of course, one then needs an app and a phone or other host device but the power consumption on Nordic Bluetooth chips is just miniscule.

steve_adams_862• 3 years ago

I guess you could toggle wifi on and off to conserve power. The S3 uses about 20mA without wifi, which isn’t too bad. It’s on par with the Pi Pico and Arduino Nano Connect as I recall. They all guzzle power when wifi is enabled, otherwise idle fairly low and peak around 80-120mA depending on processor power.

jareklupinski2• 3 years ago

i just finished an esp32 design with incredibly aggressive power savings as the primary goal

it saves persistent variables to non-volatile storage and deep-sleeps at 15-20uA according to my power profiler 2, waking up on a timer

when it wakes up, connects, checks battery, and updates display, it can peak 350mA, but mostly stays around 100-150mA while it works

cuttysnark• 3 years ago

The official Watchy firmware is designed to put the esp32 into deep sleep and only wake to update the display, which being e-ink doesn't need any further power to hold its position until the next update. In deep sleep no radios are on and the esp32 uses very small amounts of power. In my experience, I usually have to plug it into charge every ~10 days.

As far as bluetooth on Watchy goes, it's more useful for OTA updates than anything else. When in this mode, Watchy's firmware can be sent as a .bin over bluetooth. This takes only a few minutes and then the ble radio is turned off. No real hit the battery.

The other [quicker] way to flash the firmware is via usb, during which time the battery is charging.

What I like about Watchy is that it requires no phone or apps, is running firmware I wrote and flashed, and occasionally calls my server for data if I need it.

biggedyb• 3 years ago

I've got one of those. Hated the in-box case though so printed one of these: https://github.com/sqfmi/watchy-cases/tree/main/Flipped%20Ch...

Also didn't like the watch face so made my own from the default one, changed layout and font and stuff.

Oh and replaced the strap with a velcro strap.

KingOfCoders• 3 years ago

Love the ESP32 but for me it would be too power hungry for the usecase.

brokenmachine• 3 years ago

What's the battery life like?

I like the hackability but ESP32 seems like a terrible choice in terms of sleep current usage.

Open source smartwatch integrates ESP32 MCU with e-paper display

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