alt Hacker NewsA programmable watch you can actually wear
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When can we finally buy a smartwatch that can keep its (color) display ON during the entire day?
That's more a programmable watch than a DIY one :-)
I build mine from scratch, including the PCB and a 3D printed case.
For sure, that's not at all the same level of customability, programmability, capacity, nor quality. But It is really a DIY one.
For anyone interested: https://github.com/jblezoray/hpdl1414-watch
It's cool that the firmware is hackable but I think "DIY" is an imprecise way to describe that.
No mention of battery life? I guess it depends on the software that you run. But it would be nice to have a benchmark for how long it would last in normal watch mode.
This is almost $80. The PineTime watch is less than half that price. Obviously the specs are different but that's quite a difference.
I would love to see some extra sensors for heartbeat, temperature, blood oxygen and whatever else could be captured by the design.
This device looks capable of a lot of features and possibilities. Unfortunately nothing comes to my mind because I'm not good with diy hardware (once connected raspberry pi zero with led strips). Could someone tell examples of interesting and/or useful projects one can implement with this watch?
There are only a few features I care about in a smartwatch:
1. O2 monitoring. I have sleep apnea and live at high altitude, so this matters to me.
2. Motion sensor. Also mostly for tracking sleep.
3. Vibrator for notifications.
4. A screen backlight.
5. Battery life longer than a week.
6. Waterproof enough to survive a splash in the shower/rain.
I consider GPS, cellular, AI, touchscreens, cloud-only sync and control apps, and just about everything else to be anti-features. There are no devices that really cover all this that I've found. A few Garmin and Amazfit/Zepp devices come close, but they have enough drawbacks for me to not be happy with them. The new Pebble is nearly perfect, but the lack of an O2 sensor is a dealbreaker for me :(
LILYGO site shows pre-orders of all 3 versions are sold out unfortunately.
I would buy it if it had wifi. A (decent to wear) watch with wifi would be awesome. Tons of ideas for apps I would build for myself
Ofc, im excluding apple
Does anyone know if this has an accelerometer? I recently got a nice sports-oriented smartwatch (non-Garmin), to use it mostly for rowing, but it doesn't track the rowing-rate. It should be pretty easy to program one if the watch has accelerometers, but couldn't tell from the spec sheet (maybe that means no?)
I doubt if esp32s3's power consumption can be used in real life.
s/Watch/Smartwatch
Regular DYI watches aren't big news...
(I would be over the moon for a DIY smartwatch with zero AI and e-ink screen.)
This does look very cool. Every peripheral one could think of, even LoRA!
Preorders sold out already!
No heart rate sensor
trun on and trun off
have wished for decades now there was an open-source Garmin on the level of Cyanogenmod / LineageOS for Android
not sure if it will happen this decade but definitely next decade
proper running/cycling metrics are hard as demonstrated by how many well-funded competitors are somewhat close but not there 100% yet (Coros, Amazfit, etc)
someone once hacked and decompiled older Garmins but newer ones are encrypted/signed/locked-down
I like a good smart watch and I appreciate open source, but an ESP32 isn't a great pick when low power consumption is important and the device is going to be communicating regularly. I'm surprised LILYGO went that direction in a watch form factor.