[HN Gopher] Ask HN: A cheap smartwatch with a supported SDK
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: A cheap smartwatch with a supported SDK
Hi HN, I'd love to buy a smart watch for 50$ or less that'll allow
me to develop my own apps. Looks like Google is coming out with
Wear OS 3 soon, so I don't want to invest any real money in a Watch
until then
Author : 41209
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-12-11 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
| azdle wrote:
| The Bangle.js 2 just delivered to kickstarter backers:
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gfw/banglejs-2-the-open...
|
| AFAICT, it's fully open source software (except, presumably, the
| nordic hal stuff?), with a JS SDK and a hosted IDE. But, I
| haven't used it yet because it requires WebBluetooth, and I
| refuse to use chrome, and I haven't figured out if the rasppi
| hosted IDE is still supported or not, it seems that the `nw`
| package doesn't support arm (anymore?).
|
| But this was the best option I found when I was looking awhile
| ago.
|
| The other things I considered were the Pinetime (software is
| still a bit too early from what I've seen) and "Paul's Open-
| Smartwatch" https://open-smartwatch.github.io/, but I really
| wanted GPS and that version's design isn't finished yet.
| psytrx wrote:
| I'm wearing mine for a few weeks now, but it's been rather
| unstable for me. BTLE disconnects are common, and I'm not sure
| what the source of the problem might be. Also, it sometimes
| freezes in an infinite loop and drains battery really quickly
| when that happens.
|
| These are all problems fixable with software updates, and it's
| very early stages of the project. The app store grew from 80 to
| 130 apps in the last 3 weeks.
|
| The hardware on the other hand is great. It doesn't feel cheap,
| but it's really lightweight, which I enjoy. The e-ink display
| is crisp and clear, easily readable in direct sunlight, and it
| has 8 colors, which is a cool feature for an e-ink display.
|
| Didn't get my hands dirty with the SDK yet, but will hopefully
| find some time during the holidays. It looks well thought out
| though, and the web IDE and emulator seem useful.
|
| Really looking forward to dig into it.
| AmosLightnin wrote:
| Just got my Bangle.js 2 and like it very much. Also purchased a
| Watchy for the epaper display a few months back. Compared to
| Watchy, the espruino IDE and ecosystem for Bangle.js 2 is much
| more developed and the community much more active. There is
| support for widgets, custom settings, and apps other than watch
| faces, and the development / sharing path is much more thought
| through. Check out the app loader, and the 300 or so apps (all
| source available on github) here: https://banglejs.com/apps/
| 41209 wrote:
| This is pretty amazing, I'll buy one as soon as possible.
|
| Can you modify the OS itself.
|
| I want to program a watch that doesn't actually tell time.
| simonvc wrote:
| Upvote for BangleJS2. Been wearing mine for a couple of weeks
| now and it's great. The always on transreflective screen is
| really easy to read in sunlight and the battery seems great
| (over a week). Being able to quickly hack watch faces using the
| online IDE is great, i've hacked mine to be easy to read when
| i'm usually asleep and only care about the time, not the date
| and other stuff.
| 41209 wrote:
| This looks closest to what I want, I signed up for their
| waiting list
| sokoloff wrote:
| I picked up a (used) Series 3 Apple Watch for $100 early last
| year. If you got one of those, it's surely going to be worth $50
| in 12 months.
|
| I'm in the Apple ecosystem and very happy with the watch, even
| though the newer versions are surely nicer.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Apple Watch practically requires an iPhone though.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Depending on what you mean by "smart watch": you can try the Pine
| Time: https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/
|
| 51 USD will get you a sealed smart watch and a dev kit :)
| 41209 wrote:
| Can I write my own apps for the sealed version?
|
| The dev kit seems a bit too low level for me
| ushakov wrote:
| try wasp-os
|
| https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os
|
| i have personally made a metronome app for it
|
| https://gist.github.com/mishushakov/7af0c459178f152a27005d31.
| ..
| 41209 wrote:
| Fantastic, I think I'll go with the Colmi P8 and try to
| build something silly with it.
|
| Thanks
| ushakov wrote:
| they provide an emulator, so you can develop apps on your
| computer before you deploy to watch
|
| https://wasp-
| os.readthedocs.io/en/latest/appguide.html#testi...
|
| the OS itself is a app and is easily customizable
|
| but best the thing has to the community on Matrix/IRC.
| Daniel, (the creator) is very responsive and without his
| support i wouldn't be able to create my app
| TrianguloY wrote:
| It doesn't seem to have always-on display :(
|
| I also want to find a good smartwatch, tired of waiting for
| wear3.0, but an always-on display is a must have for me.
| lmns wrote:
| With that budget you won't find an always-on display. OLED
| panels are just too expensive.
| kristianp wrote:
| What about transflective lcd, like some Garmin forerunners?
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| How about e-ink watches? I know nothing about them, but it
| seems they exist and aren't specially pricy.
| 1ibsq wrote:
| Watchy [1] has already be mentioned somewhere below and
| has an e-paper display.
|
| [1] https://watchy.sqfmi.com
| fit2rule wrote:
| PineTime watch is also a _great_ place to learn Rust.
| palyancodr wrote:
| Hi!
|
| Check out the watchX: https://youtu.be/AKSIGRdL-ts You can code
| it with Scratch or Arduino. There are a lot of examples
| available: https://community.watchx.io/t/watchx-watch-face-
| collection/6...
| h4waii wrote:
| You can still develop for Pebble, even though the entire thing is
| EoL. There are lots of Pebble enthusiasts and work is still being
| done on the platform through Rebble.
|
| There's also Bangle.js to keep an eye on.
| modeless wrote:
| Yeah, Pebble has a great SDK and since it's defunct there's no
| update treadmill anymore. Anything you build today will be
| guaranteed to work as long as the hardware does.
| alistairjallan wrote:
| The Lillygo or TTGO watches you'll find on AliExpress support
| Arduino libraries, Python, C or even JavaScript.
| seniorivn wrote:
| pinetime
| Jugurtha wrote:
| I have worked for many years on fitness trackers from
| https://www.jointcorp.com. Talking with them, they sent PDF files
| for the communications protocol (Bluetooth Low Energy). I wrote a
| generic codec that consumes a YAML file and could decode packets
| from these devices to Python objects, and which could take a
| Python API call for a function you didn't write and encode it to
| binary packets the watch could understand. Practically, when we
| needed to use another device, I just added to the YAML file and
| the thing worked with practically no code change. New watch with
| GPS data? Just add to the YAML file and magic happens. Watch with
| blood pressure feature? Just add a few lines to the YAML file and
| magic happens.
|
| The code was on a Raspberry PI in which a 3G/4G dongle was
| plugged, and it connected to the watch, uploaded data, was robust
| do disconnection events either internet or BLE (used Thespian and
| the Actor model to create and kill actors). The devices were
| geographically distributed on different timezones (a fucking
| nightmare) and basically needed to work for users with zero
| technical skills. It needed to be plug and play and it just
| works. Even configuring the pairing between a Raspberry PI and
| the watch needed to be low touch (I used the analogy of a dog and
| a hand: you put your hand out for the dog to smell and recognize
| you, you put the watch nearby the Raspberry PI and it computed
| the RSSI and duration to detect the "intent" so it didn't pair
| with "drive-by" devices). Kind of like NFC, but for BLE. The data
| was sent to a backend, then displayed on a mobile application
| (the prototype had a Grafana dashboard that showed your activity
| in near-real time).
|
| Talk with them. They'll probably send you the PDF spec and you
| can do whatever you want.
| 41209 wrote:
| That's cool, but I was trying to find a company that publishes
| it's SDK. Ideally some app examples as well.
|
| That said, given how cheap these watches are I'm open to trying
| anything. Were you able to write your own custom app too, or
| just consume existing data ?
| Jugurtha wrote:
| > _Were you able to write your own custom app too, or just
| consume existing data ?_
|
| As mentioned in my original comment with additional: I wrote
| an application that ran on Raspberry PI devices in different
| continents, countries, and time zones that connected to
| trackers worn by people with zero technical skills and worked
| nonetheless surviving disconnection events and automatically
| upgrading the software, communicating with the trackers and
| sending serialized data (protobufs) to a server application
| in Scala my colleague wrote, that then made analysis and
| aggregations and sent result to yet another mobile
| application (Android) another colleague wrote to display
| graphs and other data. The application I wrote worked with
| several models of this company's products, and at some point,
| we thought of making it more generic and use it for video and
| sound feeds for another project ("sound event detection",
| let's say).
|
| Yes, I was able to build a custom app and it worked not only
| on my data, but on others' data as well.
|
| The funniest conversations we had were about _time_ and _time
| zones_. At some point, we started using _timestamp timestamp_
| and _timestamp not timestamp_ because working on data from
| multiple time zones makes you question what on earth is
| _time_ , and what actually is _now_ ( "Now for whom?" "Now
| where?").
|
| I had literally _nightmares_ about time and time zones. No, I
| am not kidding.
| 41209 wrote:
| >that ran on Raspberry PI devices
|
| You were able to create a companion app, but I'm talking
| about actually running custom apps on the tracker itself.
| Do you know if that's possible
| Jugurtha wrote:
| > _You were able to create a companion app, but I 'm
| talking about actually running custom apps on the tracker
| itself. Do you know if that's possible_
|
| I understand. You meant an SDK to create an application
| for the tracker itself, not get the raw data (which many
| of the trackers don't even give easily) and then make
| something with that.
|
| I am not aware if they support, or give access to this. I
| misunderstood your original question.
| 41209 wrote:
| Yes, I want to actually make apps for the tracker. Other
| watches do support this, according to other posts in the
| thread.
|
| However, your use case did spark my interest. Were you
| running a fitness company or something, was the tracker a
| key part of making sure your customers stayed on track.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| We worked on a project for the elderly: we wanted to
| detect anomalies in their behavior to scale social
| workers and draw their attention to the seniors who
| actually needed assistance. Is there an anomaly in their
| behavior (lack of heart-rate variability is thought to be
| a sign of depression or other problems? are they walking
| less than usual? are they sleeping well? what is the
| proxy for loneliness? what is a proxy for anxiousness?
| are they waking up in the middle of the night when they
| didn't use to? Have they fell?)
|
| The mobile application was for social workers to track
| the behavior of seniors who were assigned to them. They
| received alerts based on some triggers and rules after
| analyzing the data that we consulted cariologists, social
| workers, paramedics for.
|
| It was psychologically hard because the question I always
| asked the team was "Would you trust your parents' life
| with this?", and we built against that standard with the
| constraints at the time with the answer almost always
| being "no, I can improve X, Y, and Z". It was never
| enough.
| diego_moita wrote:
| You can find old Pebbles at that price at eBay[1]
|
| IMO, it still is one of the best smartwatches.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
| lormayna wrote:
| How do you deal with the lack of Pebbles cloud services?
| metapsj wrote:
| hopefully you find this helpful...
|
| On December 7th, 2016, Pebble announced that they were
| ceasing operations. Two days later, on December 9th, 2016,
| the Rebble web site went live, announcing our intention to
| "maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of
| Pebble Technology Corp." We have fulfilled much of this goal
| via Rebble Web Services, which restores most of the
| functionality that the Pebble community knows and loves.
|
| https://rebble.io/
| modeless wrote:
| Rebble is still hosting them and they work great. But they're
| not really required for the watch to work.
| habeebtc wrote:
| Personally, I find the lack of cloud services to be relaxing.
| Because the thing always works that way, instead of
| occasionally melting down because some cloud service is
| having an outage and the failure mode is not well thought
| out.
| jsilence wrote:
| Maybe Watchy does what you want. No personal experience though.
| https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
| craftinator wrote:
| I have one, and have found it quite excellent. Easy to play
| around with, pretty good documentation, and the eink is really
| nice. There's something like 30 watch faces already designed,
| so you can just fork off one you like.
|
| Highly recommend the anodized aluminum case. The plastic one is
| sturdy enough, but with the thickness of the material, makes
| the watch feel bulky. Also, the aluminum one has such a good
| fit (they are precision CNCed) that it can handle water
| splashes with no problem, and a few gaskets can get it to IP64
| or 65
| atemerev wrote:
| There are many ESP32 smartwatches available on Aliexpress for
| about this price. ESP32 is compatible with Arduino IDE,
| PlatformIO, and many other development tools.
| sorenjan wrote:
| > Looks like Google is coming out with Wear OS 3 soon
|
| Wear OS 3 is already out.
|
| https://www.androidauthority.com/wear-os-3-watches-2736393/
| evan_ wrote:
| See if you can find a Timex Datalink on eBay
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-11 23:01 UTC)