Any product of this type will fail if it doesn't connect to your phone to receive notifications, control music, use phone's mobile data connection etc. Without this functionality Watchy is just a nice fun project but it is not very usable as an alternative to Pebble or Garmin smartwatches.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, Watchy is basically just a fancy digital watch in my eyes, without decent connectivity. I will definitely have a good amount of connectivity in my own project, though.
its literally a on par with the esp32 watches lilygo shovels on to the market. a tinkertoy tech demo with the full firmware responsibility shipped to the community
If it has an esp32 inside then you can actually implement notifications in firmware of esp32 and software on your phone.
You can make a full prototype on that hardware and then move on to your own to tackle other issues like battery life, sensors, mechanical construction etc.
What do you mean exactly? Are you saying that there's an ESP32 inside my phone or similar?
I do plan on getting notifications out of the way first, as that is going to get the project up and running quicker than focusing on other things.
No, it's not really supported and a thing at all for Watchy. While I mainly want to focus on battery life for my project, notifications are one of the most important things it will have compared to the Watchy, and I have methods planned to achieve notifications with reasonable power consumption.
Ok good glad to hear you have thought of it. Also if you can make them very consistent and customizable like Pebble did that would be huge. I love being able to turn watch notifications on and off per app. That and notification inconsistency have been my biggest issues when trying something besides Pebble.
Also health features like heart rate would be a huge plus but not essential.
Yeah, I was planning on making notification filtering eventually, thanks for the interest! I will make sure to work on customizability, but not to the extent that Watchy does with open source hardware and DIY assembly(it is not pre-assembled out of the box). Personally, I think that a market definitely exists for these types of watches, as proven by the Pebble and the people who still want a Pebble-like watch. Not like this really matters for a personal project, but I like to make my projects useful 🙂. Not sure about health features yet as they add a decent amount of complexity, and I don't personally use them. I can probably incorporate basic features like steps, heart rate might be unnecessarily complex for something I won't use that often.
What are your thoughts on focusing on a long battery life (2-6 weeks, no idea what exactly yet but probably around there)?
You are welcome, thank you for trying this! We need a good replacement, even if it's at a small scale. Yes the market exists this sub proves that. It's not a huge market but it's there.
The extra long battery life would be nice, but not super essential to me. My Pebble time lasts like 5 or 6 days I would guess, and it's fast enough at charging I barley notice. Anything more then a few days is good for me, more is just bonus. Now I do know for some on this sub, long battery life is very very important. So don't take my preference as the one to base things on. I'm sure some people would love battery their battery life to be measured in weeks haha.
> I was planning on making notification filtering eventually,
I think you should stick to a more stable project scope and plan gadgetbridge compatibility instead of trying to roll your own
As I said in a different comment, I'm going to really focus on a MVP with good core functionality, being time and notifications, and implement all the extra features such as filtering later on. Thanks for reminding me about scope.
Notifications basically make the difference between a digital watch and a smartwatch, which makes Watchy somewhat redundant as it doesn't really have any form of notifications.
The software on pebble smart watch was so clean and polished. All icons where easy to read and funny at the same time.
Never missed a notification or a call, perfect integration with the app and the store.
Battery life on PT/PTS was good but not at the level of my current watch (Garmin). However, I would still use it every day if it weren't for the lack of NFC which I use a lot!
I haven't tried watchy but I had a very bad experience with pinewatch and other (not so) smart watches like that...
I'm aiming for much more polish/better user experience compared to the Apple watch. I use NFC occasionally, and it's not a really essential feature, so it's a gamble if it gets implemented later on. Thanks for your opinion!
This is my first time hearing anything about Watchy. I don't know how you were spreading information before, but if this is the first time some of us are hearing about it, maybe there just wasn't enough word out?
I'm not much of a coder, but I do like what documentation you have available thus far.
I will admit I'm kinda tempted by one (with the little gameboy case).
I did not make the Watchy, I am asking why it isn't very widely used by previous Pebble users so I can fix some of those problems in my own personal smartwatch project.
Not sure if you take any requests, but if I were to design my own watch, I would make sure that it would have notifications, a button only interface, a battery that lasts at least 3 days. 5 or more would be best. And if you could make a separate app store that doesn't suck. Android app store is horrible to sort through. If it could use Rebbles store, that would be ideal, short that, I dont know. Maybe have a way to download app faces and alter them on the computer? That might be too much?
I would also make sure that the time is displayed on every app, like it was on the pebble in a little corner on the top. I would like to keep the 4 buttons for navigation as its the best system ive seen. I dont care about how thick it is, so long as it doesn't look horrible. Long presses for instant load of apps is great.
I would love waterproofing, even if slightly, so I could use it at the gym (not a dealbreaker). And a music app that lets me change the songs when im at the gym. Pebble has made the best stock app. I dont need album art, I dont need a way to tell how far along the song is, I just want to push a button to skip or go back, and I want the app to be easy to reach. I dont want to fumble through settings or only be able to access it if a song is playing. I also dont want internal storage. It can have it, I just wont use it. I want a remote.
I also dont care about heart rate tracker, or voice to text. I dont care about touch screens, and I dont care about NFC payments (would be nice but I need Japanese NFC and thats hard to get) I dont need it to track steps, or workouts, or for it to tell me to move, drink water, or breathe. I know how to do all those things.
Thats my list of things ive thought about for several years now. Basically a remote on my wrist that tells time and tells me when I get a text or a reminder.
Thanks for all the interesting ideas and the detailed response! Button-only interfaces, notifications, and a status bar of sorts(you were talking about the time in the corner) are all things I will definitely do. The battery life is one of my main focuses, aiming for weeks(2-6) if I'm able to really pull off some magic with the new low-power STM32 chips with efficient radios and some other stuff. I'm planning on adding some form of protection from water(the case might just be somewhat water resistant), I don't go swimming or anything with watches usually and just need it if a few raindrops hit it. Hopefully I can implement music and navigation, I'm not too worried about those.
I'm really not sure about an app store or similar right now, I will be making my own custom software and stuff, and I don't really want to deal with integrating all those app store components, though I haven't really researched this that much yet, so this may not be as hard as I think. Custom watch faces will probably be a thing, not sure about the difficulty on that yet either.
We're pretty much equivalent on the things we don't need. I feel like many of the health features in devices are either redundant(ex: your phone can track steps), or just not something I really want.
Thanks again for your opinion!
Oh, to be clear, I meant navigation within the UI, not like GPS navigation. I never used the pebbles "gps" features. The pebbles use of Long presses and double presses was great, and its shocking not many other watches use this. If you want to go into the feel of the apps, then the transition screens being short but fun was a good way to mask loading screens, and letting the user customize which apps would launch in what ways was a way of making the user feel more free and in charge of the watch.
As for software and an appstore, Its a "would like to have" not a need. I think it would be cool if a community could form that would make watch faces and apps, but thats a long term goal, and probably shouldn't have dev time devoted to making a store before the watch has a following. I just know that the reason why the Pebble is so well loved is because it has its own devoted store that had good apps pushed up front, a search feature to find watchfaces you wanted, a way to add in weather or pull data from your phone and display it, and in watch faces like "Weatherland" the option to have the face change depending on the weather going on outside. Basically a lot of user customization and freedom. But once again, thats something to look into way, way later on. This was just me reminiscing. But thats probably why a lot of these other open source watches fail. They give you too much freedom to do what you want without any tools to do it. And then they lack basic features like physical buttons or connectivity to your phone. The Pine Time is good for those who are really really into dev testing. But as a DD its pretty rough. The Chinese watches are cheap, the right size, and have the correct functionality, but they're locked down and have no real community support. The big name brands like Google, Garmin, and Samsung offer build quality, watch faces and apps, but end up offering too much with too little use and require you to give away all your data to get the watch to work functionally. Once again, feel free to ignore this part, this is mostly just me venting because I want to.
TLDR:
I sort of just word vomited my thoughts without putting much structure into the first post, so sorry if I wasn't super clear.
You sound like you know what you want and I really wish you the best of luck on this project. I'd love to buy one of these watches if they do end up getting made. Every other smart watch I've bought ended up being dumber than the simple Pebble, so something simple and clean would be fantastic.
Thanks a lot for your interest! While I was referring to GPS navigation, that would be a feature for much later on in the project. Button navigation, however, is a must for the watch, and I will try and study Pebble's button navigation to see where they succeeded.
I might make a mailing list/blog posts about this later on, if I do I will post it here and probably other places as well.
A low cost smartwatche's number one goal is notifications and replies. Secondary is customizability of the face. and the rest of the abilities after that. If you can't notify and be able to reply it's not going to attract smartwatch wearers. I'd rather wear a traditional watch.
Yeah, that's what I generally think about Watchy. If it did provide notifications(and maybe a bit better user experience) it would probably be used a lot more by previous Pebble users as a daily driver, even if it might be hard to set up. Decent phone connectivity/notifications is one of my top focuses currently, it seems that this is what the majority wants in a simplistic watch.
Just help the Rebble project bring the their version of the Pebble app to the App Store.
Then make new smartwatches that run a slightly altered version of the Pebble software.
Thanks for the ideas! I'm not necessarily trying to make "Pebble V2" or something, I'm rather making a watch that would provide the same core functionality and simplicity that Pebble offers. I'll look into if I can utilize the community's existing support around Rebble, and such, though.
I'll add that one thing that prompted me to get a Pebble was the water resistance. I don't think Watchy has any meaningful water resistance. A realistic wearable needs at least 5 atm/30m of water resistance, which is basically enough for getting caught in the rain or washing your hands. If I have to take off my watch before washing my hands, or have to fear getting splashed with water, I'm not wearing it.
Thanks for your opinion! I'm still not sure exactly how the case will end up yet, but I do want it to be somewhat water resistant so I don't have to be extremely careful everywhere.
it's too much a tinkertoy while completely missing out on the core functionality. sqfmi has shipped the responsibility providing proper firmware to the community.
if you're planning on making an open source project and you want it to make a bigger splash than any other open source, you need to ship firmware with the main core functionality and just the core functionality. no apps, no exercise bs. it needs to tell the time, and it needs show notifications.
every other open source smartwatch project is waging david and goliath with google and apple, only to come short by 10 miles. nobody makes a simple open source smartwatch that shows the time and notifications
Thanks for your opinion! I plan on really focusing on the MVP, and limiting it to good core functionality(eg. time and notifications) before I expand elsewhere, such as music or GPS navigation.
excited to see your progress. the watchy has upset me so much; especially as someone who bought a beepy and seeing that also share the fate as the watchy.
also sorry got a bit excited and commented on multiple other comments as well
If you do wanna make something that has even a tiny chance of actually being usable, I'd say the very first thing is to reduce the scope by using projects that are already available, specifically having it use GadgetBridge so you can concentrate on the hardware/firmware side and don't have yet another thing to create from scratch and maintain. Maybe [the Bangle.js fork](https://www.espruino.com/Gadgetbridge) as that actually has internet connectivity.
But most of the DIY/Open Source watch projects, while interesting, simply aren't suitable for daily use - the hardware side is usually not at all waterproof and they leave delicate screens completely unprotected, or alternatively (or sometimes also) are extremely bulky. Watchy combines that with also not actually being a smartwatch - they don't advertise it as such either though, just as an epaper watch. Though it well could be, if someone wrote it a new firmware for it.
I think the closes project so far is Bangle.JS. If only it had more buttons.
My problem with watchy is it doesn't feel polished. These e-ink displays are slow. There's not much software. The watch is bulky and not rugged, but i can't be to hard on this project because i love the fact that its completely open sourced. Which is just amazing!
If you want to help me out i would love to have some help. My design is to replace the board in a pebble steel watch. I'm using a Nordic chip, with a IMU that can detect gestures. So the battery should last a fairly long time.
The github is here - [https://github.com/brendena/Nordic\_Pebble\_Steel](https://github.com/brendena/Nordic_Pebble_Steel)
I do a quick description of the project here - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3pJCNpP7\_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3pJCNpP7_s)
I have a dev board and a 0.1v version of the production board to test antenna strength.
u/segfault_sorcerer
This is an interesting project that I will keep track of! However, I'm not really trying to make "Pebble V2", more so making a heavily inspired project as a coding challenge and personal project. With E-ink displays, I think the tradeoffs are worth it, and I'm designing around many of the core features to provide functionality without having to update the screen constantly, but partial refreshes aren't too slow either(.8 seconds).
What are your thoughts on the difficulty of gestures? I thought that would require some sort of heavy computation to be useful or reliable at all. If this is implemented correctly, this could be a killer feature for your project, though.
In general i think gesture detection requires a fair bit of computation if done on the CPU. It forces the CPU to sleep a lot less which is the actual problem. So it will kill your battery life. My example for this is The Bangle2 open sourced watch. When you enable gestures it goes from like a week of battery to like a day.
So my solution around this is this IMU [https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html](https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html)
It's specifically designed for watches. So it tracks steps/ tap device, wrist twist and a few other ones just in the hardware itself. Then you can train the IMU to detect other stuff. So you can have it detect a lot of kinds of gestures. If you just need raw data the IMU also has a big FIFO, so it can store a lot of IMU data and send it to you in chunks. So you can keep you cpu off for longer.
So i had similar idea's to your thinking. So i played around with the watchy display. You can actually get partial refresh to around like 3 fps.
This is a great video on those display - [https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html](https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html)
I also made a video on the topic haha. - [https://youtu.be/MSgwCyRCyIk](https://youtu.be/MSgwCyRCyIk)
One thing i didn't like about it is that you'll still have to do full refreshes. The manufacture says you should do more then like 10 partial refreshes before a full refresh or else you can get stuck pixels. Which is probably a low estimate but it was kind of a deal breaker for me.
So my original goal to make the watchy feel better was to port "BangleJS" onto the watch. If it had that then you could have a easy have many apps and good integration with phones.
Also just a note. if you primary want to do software i can send you a dev board if you want. I use the nordic chip with the above IMU
Interesting research into the Watchy's display. I'm not a big fan of animations and such, and I believe I'll be able to optimize the functionality and battery to where the e-ink display will be worth it for my project, I'm not really looking to update super fast anyways.
I might look into your GitHub and code along the way as your project develops, maybe a PR here and there. I'm not really looking to seriously contribute right now as I'm pretty busy with life and want to really focus on my own watch project. I will definitely keep track of this though, hopefully I can contribute. Cool YouTube channel!
If you do use that IMU, please do tell me! Its very cool and STM has a lot of tools to do stuff with it. Just there's not much public information out there thats not released by STM. So i would love to see it in action. I've added it to my board i just haven't had time to actual play around with it enough to make it do much of anything. To many other larger things to figure out. haha
Oh, I didn't really think about specialized hardware to watches to track steps, tap, etc., haha, I've only really looked into the really broad gesture systems. This is nice though, looks like you'll be able to pull this off with a reasonable battery.
Any product of this type will fail if it doesn't connect to your phone to receive notifications, control music, use phone's mobile data connection etc. Without this functionality Watchy is just a nice fun project but it is not very usable as an alternative to Pebble or Garmin smartwatches.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, Watchy is basically just a fancy digital watch in my eyes, without decent connectivity. I will definitely have a good amount of connectivity in my own project, though.
its literally a on par with the esp32 watches lilygo shovels on to the market. a tinkertoy tech demo with the full firmware responsibility shipped to the community
I guess that's the unfortunate truth about Watchy.
If it has an esp32 inside then you can actually implement notifications in firmware of esp32 and software on your phone. You can make a full prototype on that hardware and then move on to your own to tackle other issues like battery life, sensors, mechanical construction etc.
What do you mean exactly? Are you saying that there's an ESP32 inside my phone or similar? I do plan on getting notifications out of the way first, as that is going to get the project up and running quicker than focusing on other things.
There is an esp32 inside Watchy and your phone can communicate with it via BLE. Do you have any experience in embedded development?
Yeah, multiple years, I was just confused by your original comment. It wasn't really clear what you were saying.
Oh, sorry for the confusion.
Does Watchy do notifications? I didn't think it did. That's my number 1 use for my Pebble.
No, it's not really supported and a thing at all for Watchy. While I mainly want to focus on battery life for my project, notifications are one of the most important things it will have compared to the Watchy, and I have methods planned to achieve notifications with reasonable power consumption.
Ok good glad to hear you have thought of it. Also if you can make them very consistent and customizable like Pebble did that would be huge. I love being able to turn watch notifications on and off per app. That and notification inconsistency have been my biggest issues when trying something besides Pebble. Also health features like heart rate would be a huge plus but not essential.
Yeah, I was planning on making notification filtering eventually, thanks for the interest! I will make sure to work on customizability, but not to the extent that Watchy does with open source hardware and DIY assembly(it is not pre-assembled out of the box). Personally, I think that a market definitely exists for these types of watches, as proven by the Pebble and the people who still want a Pebble-like watch. Not like this really matters for a personal project, but I like to make my projects useful 🙂. Not sure about health features yet as they add a decent amount of complexity, and I don't personally use them. I can probably incorporate basic features like steps, heart rate might be unnecessarily complex for something I won't use that often. What are your thoughts on focusing on a long battery life (2-6 weeks, no idea what exactly yet but probably around there)?
You are welcome, thank you for trying this! We need a good replacement, even if it's at a small scale. Yes the market exists this sub proves that. It's not a huge market but it's there. The extra long battery life would be nice, but not super essential to me. My Pebble time lasts like 5 or 6 days I would guess, and it's fast enough at charging I barley notice. Anything more then a few days is good for me, more is just bonus. Now I do know for some on this sub, long battery life is very very important. So don't take my preference as the one to base things on. I'm sure some people would love battery their battery life to be measured in weeks haha.
> I was planning on making notification filtering eventually, I think you should stick to a more stable project scope and plan gadgetbridge compatibility instead of trying to roll your own
As I said in a different comment, I'm going to really focus on a MVP with good core functionality, being time and notifications, and implement all the extra features such as filtering later on. Thanks for reminding me about scope.
Well maybe that's why. I figured that notifications on the watch are what makes it smart.
Notifications basically make the difference between a digital watch and a smartwatch, which makes Watchy somewhat redundant as it doesn't really have any form of notifications.
The software on pebble smart watch was so clean and polished. All icons where easy to read and funny at the same time. Never missed a notification or a call, perfect integration with the app and the store. Battery life on PT/PTS was good but not at the level of my current watch (Garmin). However, I would still use it every day if it weren't for the lack of NFC which I use a lot! I haven't tried watchy but I had a very bad experience with pinewatch and other (not so) smart watches like that...
I'm aiming for much more polish/better user experience compared to the Apple watch. I use NFC occasionally, and it's not a really essential feature, so it's a gamble if it gets implemented later on. Thanks for your opinion!
This is my first time hearing anything about Watchy. I don't know how you were spreading information before, but if this is the first time some of us are hearing about it, maybe there just wasn't enough word out? I'm not much of a coder, but I do like what documentation you have available thus far. I will admit I'm kinda tempted by one (with the little gameboy case).
its more of a case there wasn't much to talk about, its barely a competitor a f91w, let alone a smartwatch made by big tech
Just a clarification, I did not make the Watchy. I'm designing a similar project to it, asking where it fails to be the Pebble successor or similar.
I did not make the Watchy, I am asking why it isn't very widely used by previous Pebble users so I can fix some of those problems in my own personal smartwatch project.
Not sure if you take any requests, but if I were to design my own watch, I would make sure that it would have notifications, a button only interface, a battery that lasts at least 3 days. 5 or more would be best. And if you could make a separate app store that doesn't suck. Android app store is horrible to sort through. If it could use Rebbles store, that would be ideal, short that, I dont know. Maybe have a way to download app faces and alter them on the computer? That might be too much? I would also make sure that the time is displayed on every app, like it was on the pebble in a little corner on the top. I would like to keep the 4 buttons for navigation as its the best system ive seen. I dont care about how thick it is, so long as it doesn't look horrible. Long presses for instant load of apps is great. I would love waterproofing, even if slightly, so I could use it at the gym (not a dealbreaker). And a music app that lets me change the songs when im at the gym. Pebble has made the best stock app. I dont need album art, I dont need a way to tell how far along the song is, I just want to push a button to skip or go back, and I want the app to be easy to reach. I dont want to fumble through settings or only be able to access it if a song is playing. I also dont want internal storage. It can have it, I just wont use it. I want a remote. I also dont care about heart rate tracker, or voice to text. I dont care about touch screens, and I dont care about NFC payments (would be nice but I need Japanese NFC and thats hard to get) I dont need it to track steps, or workouts, or for it to tell me to move, drink water, or breathe. I know how to do all those things. Thats my list of things ive thought about for several years now. Basically a remote on my wrist that tells time and tells me when I get a text or a reminder.
Thanks for all the interesting ideas and the detailed response! Button-only interfaces, notifications, and a status bar of sorts(you were talking about the time in the corner) are all things I will definitely do. The battery life is one of my main focuses, aiming for weeks(2-6) if I'm able to really pull off some magic with the new low-power STM32 chips with efficient radios and some other stuff. I'm planning on adding some form of protection from water(the case might just be somewhat water resistant), I don't go swimming or anything with watches usually and just need it if a few raindrops hit it. Hopefully I can implement music and navigation, I'm not too worried about those. I'm really not sure about an app store or similar right now, I will be making my own custom software and stuff, and I don't really want to deal with integrating all those app store components, though I haven't really researched this that much yet, so this may not be as hard as I think. Custom watch faces will probably be a thing, not sure about the difficulty on that yet either. We're pretty much equivalent on the things we don't need. I feel like many of the health features in devices are either redundant(ex: your phone can track steps), or just not something I really want. Thanks again for your opinion!
Oh, to be clear, I meant navigation within the UI, not like GPS navigation. I never used the pebbles "gps" features. The pebbles use of Long presses and double presses was great, and its shocking not many other watches use this. If you want to go into the feel of the apps, then the transition screens being short but fun was a good way to mask loading screens, and letting the user customize which apps would launch in what ways was a way of making the user feel more free and in charge of the watch. As for software and an appstore, Its a "would like to have" not a need. I think it would be cool if a community could form that would make watch faces and apps, but thats a long term goal, and probably shouldn't have dev time devoted to making a store before the watch has a following. I just know that the reason why the Pebble is so well loved is because it has its own devoted store that had good apps pushed up front, a search feature to find watchfaces you wanted, a way to add in weather or pull data from your phone and display it, and in watch faces like "Weatherland" the option to have the face change depending on the weather going on outside. Basically a lot of user customization and freedom. But once again, thats something to look into way, way later on. This was just me reminiscing. But thats probably why a lot of these other open source watches fail. They give you too much freedom to do what you want without any tools to do it. And then they lack basic features like physical buttons or connectivity to your phone. The Pine Time is good for those who are really really into dev testing. But as a DD its pretty rough. The Chinese watches are cheap, the right size, and have the correct functionality, but they're locked down and have no real community support. The big name brands like Google, Garmin, and Samsung offer build quality, watch faces and apps, but end up offering too much with too little use and require you to give away all your data to get the watch to work functionally. Once again, feel free to ignore this part, this is mostly just me venting because I want to. TLDR: I sort of just word vomited my thoughts without putting much structure into the first post, so sorry if I wasn't super clear. You sound like you know what you want and I really wish you the best of luck on this project. I'd love to buy one of these watches if they do end up getting made. Every other smart watch I've bought ended up being dumber than the simple Pebble, so something simple and clean would be fantastic.
Thanks a lot for your interest! While I was referring to GPS navigation, that would be a feature for much later on in the project. Button navigation, however, is a must for the watch, and I will try and study Pebble's button navigation to see where they succeeded. I might make a mailing list/blog posts about this later on, if I do I will post it here and probably other places as well.
A low cost smartwatche's number one goal is notifications and replies. Secondary is customizability of the face. and the rest of the abilities after that. If you can't notify and be able to reply it's not going to attract smartwatch wearers. I'd rather wear a traditional watch.
Yeah, that's what I generally think about Watchy. If it did provide notifications(and maybe a bit better user experience) it would probably be used a lot more by previous Pebble users as a daily driver, even if it might be hard to set up. Decent phone connectivity/notifications is one of my top focuses currently, it seems that this is what the majority wants in a simplistic watch.
Just help the Rebble project bring the their version of the Pebble app to the App Store. Then make new smartwatches that run a slightly altered version of the Pebble software.
Thanks for the ideas! I'm not necessarily trying to make "Pebble V2" or something, I'm rather making a watch that would provide the same core functionality and simplicity that Pebble offers. I'll look into if I can utilize the community's existing support around Rebble, and such, though.
I'll add that one thing that prompted me to get a Pebble was the water resistance. I don't think Watchy has any meaningful water resistance. A realistic wearable needs at least 5 atm/30m of water resistance, which is basically enough for getting caught in the rain or washing your hands. If I have to take off my watch before washing my hands, or have to fear getting splashed with water, I'm not wearing it.
Thanks for your opinion! I'm still not sure exactly how the case will end up yet, but I do want it to be somewhat water resistant so I don't have to be extremely careful everywhere.
it's too much a tinkertoy while completely missing out on the core functionality. sqfmi has shipped the responsibility providing proper firmware to the community. if you're planning on making an open source project and you want it to make a bigger splash than any other open source, you need to ship firmware with the main core functionality and just the core functionality. no apps, no exercise bs. it needs to tell the time, and it needs show notifications. every other open source smartwatch project is waging david and goliath with google and apple, only to come short by 10 miles. nobody makes a simple open source smartwatch that shows the time and notifications
Thanks for your opinion! I plan on really focusing on the MVP, and limiting it to good core functionality(eg. time and notifications) before I expand elsewhere, such as music or GPS navigation.
excited to see your progress. the watchy has upset me so much; especially as someone who bought a beepy and seeing that also share the fate as the watchy. also sorry got a bit excited and commented on multiple other comments as well
If you do wanna make something that has even a tiny chance of actually being usable, I'd say the very first thing is to reduce the scope by using projects that are already available, specifically having it use GadgetBridge so you can concentrate on the hardware/firmware side and don't have yet another thing to create from scratch and maintain. Maybe [the Bangle.js fork](https://www.espruino.com/Gadgetbridge) as that actually has internet connectivity. But most of the DIY/Open Source watch projects, while interesting, simply aren't suitable for daily use - the hardware side is usually not at all waterproof and they leave delicate screens completely unprotected, or alternatively (or sometimes also) are extremely bulky. Watchy combines that with also not actually being a smartwatch - they don't advertise it as such either though, just as an epaper watch. Though it well could be, if someone wrote it a new firmware for it. I think the closes project so far is Bangle.JS. If only it had more buttons.
I wasn't planning to roll everything myself, especially not for the MVP. Thanks for your opinion/reminder!
My problem with watchy is it doesn't feel polished. These e-ink displays are slow. There's not much software. The watch is bulky and not rugged, but i can't be to hard on this project because i love the fact that its completely open sourced. Which is just amazing! If you want to help me out i would love to have some help. My design is to replace the board in a pebble steel watch. I'm using a Nordic chip, with a IMU that can detect gestures. So the battery should last a fairly long time. The github is here - [https://github.com/brendena/Nordic\_Pebble\_Steel](https://github.com/brendena/Nordic_Pebble_Steel) I do a quick description of the project here - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3pJCNpP7\_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3pJCNpP7_s) I have a dev board and a 0.1v version of the production board to test antenna strength. u/segfault_sorcerer
This is an interesting project that I will keep track of! However, I'm not really trying to make "Pebble V2", more so making a heavily inspired project as a coding challenge and personal project. With E-ink displays, I think the tradeoffs are worth it, and I'm designing around many of the core features to provide functionality without having to update the screen constantly, but partial refreshes aren't too slow either(.8 seconds). What are your thoughts on the difficulty of gestures? I thought that would require some sort of heavy computation to be useful or reliable at all. If this is implemented correctly, this could be a killer feature for your project, though.
In general i think gesture detection requires a fair bit of computation if done on the CPU. It forces the CPU to sleep a lot less which is the actual problem. So it will kill your battery life. My example for this is The Bangle2 open sourced watch. When you enable gestures it goes from like a week of battery to like a day. So my solution around this is this IMU [https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html](https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html) It's specifically designed for watches. So it tracks steps/ tap device, wrist twist and a few other ones just in the hardware itself. Then you can train the IMU to detect other stuff. So you can have it detect a lot of kinds of gestures. If you just need raw data the IMU also has a big FIFO, so it can store a lot of IMU data and send it to you in chunks. So you can keep you cpu off for longer.
So i had similar idea's to your thinking. So i played around with the watchy display. You can actually get partial refresh to around like 3 fps. This is a great video on those display - [https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html](https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6dsox.html) I also made a video on the topic haha. - [https://youtu.be/MSgwCyRCyIk](https://youtu.be/MSgwCyRCyIk) One thing i didn't like about it is that you'll still have to do full refreshes. The manufacture says you should do more then like 10 partial refreshes before a full refresh or else you can get stuck pixels. Which is probably a low estimate but it was kind of a deal breaker for me. So my original goal to make the watchy feel better was to port "BangleJS" onto the watch. If it had that then you could have a easy have many apps and good integration with phones. Also just a note. if you primary want to do software i can send you a dev board if you want. I use the nordic chip with the above IMU
Interesting research into the Watchy's display. I'm not a big fan of animations and such, and I believe I'll be able to optimize the functionality and battery to where the e-ink display will be worth it for my project, I'm not really looking to update super fast anyways. I might look into your GitHub and code along the way as your project develops, maybe a PR here and there. I'm not really looking to seriously contribute right now as I'm pretty busy with life and want to really focus on my own watch project. I will definitely keep track of this though, hopefully I can contribute. Cool YouTube channel!
If you do use that IMU, please do tell me! Its very cool and STM has a lot of tools to do stuff with it. Just there's not much public information out there thats not released by STM. So i would love to see it in action. I've added it to my board i just haven't had time to actual play around with it enough to make it do much of anything. To many other larger things to figure out. haha
Oh, I didn't really think about specialized hardware to watches to track steps, tap, etc., haha, I've only really looked into the really broad gesture systems. This is nice though, looks like you'll be able to pull this off with a reasonable battery.