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Comment by konraditurbe | Hacker News Reader

I love how this project matured, I used it last year for my old G Watch and it ran pretty well, definitively worth checking out if you have a compatible smartwatch as it can be booted once leaving WearOS intact. It uses Libhybris to communicate with some Android libraries but the front end is Linux components like Wayland and QT. You can make Apps in QT which is nice. Notifications work with Asteroid app and the OS feels responsive. You cannot reply to notifications yet. I flashed v1.0 to my G Watch permanently since it fills my needs. The choice of watchfaces is neat too.

Shame that most Wear OS watches don't come with pins for USB access.

Unfortunately this does not solve Wear OS watches short battery life.

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> Shame that most Wear OS watches don't come with pins for USB access.

I thought I was out of luck with my moto360 1st gen, but I found this : https://www.rootjunky.com/moto-360-adapter-usb-cable/

Basically, there is usb connection on that watch, it's just hidden and made difficult to use.

Which makes me think : maybe it's the same for other apparently usb lacking watches? I can imagine manufacturers' developers would want a mean to debug devices out of factory.

You loose waterproofing, and Moto 360 has a TI chip which makes it difficult to port Asteroid OS to it.

Thanks for mentioning it, I don't care about waterproofing but I intended to attempt a port (I get a librem5 as soon as they're out so my android wear will be basically useless by then), so the chip thing may be a problem.

Do you know if anyone documented a previous attempt somewhere? Or do you have any other knowledge that makes you say this will be a problem?

https://asteroidos.org/wiki/porting-guide/

You can try, the sony sw3 has a bcom chip and has still some bugs.

Yes, that's what I read before deciding to try it :)

But my question was more about what you were saying about the TI chip, what makes you say it will be a problem? (eg different architecture, known limitations, etc)

Well, since it uses Libhybris for interfacing with Android it should not be a problem to port it, but, the advantage of the snapdragon chips is that most watches use the same chip so the code was reusable (eg: g watch > g watch r), so you might encounter some issues that are not present on the existing ported watches. Fortunately the source code for the kernel on the omap3 is available for download: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OMAP3_GIT_Linux_Kern...

Awesome, thanks for the info!

thanks to google/motorola build quality (which was during the phase moto360 and motoX came out) the back of both those devices are 100% guaranteed to be cracked already and any waterproofing claims gone.

but you are rigth on the TI chip. not even wearOS was updated past the release version there.

I would definitely do this, but my G Watch refuses to work with the charging dock now - any tips for bringing them back to life?

Ah yes, I just put a rubberband to tighten it, clean the dock with cleaning alcohol as well as the watchpins with a q-tip.

I owned a first gen G watch and had the exact same issue where the charging pod connection to the watch becomes unstable and eventually it stopped working after a few months so it just ended up in my cardboard. I suspect the connection point on the watch is not very resistant to sweating.

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