Programmable OLED watch by Texas Instruments and Fossil | Hacker News Reader

Programmable OLED watch by Texas Instruments and Fossil

metawatch.org

73 pointsgrowt49 comments

This could be really interesting, but for the lack of low-powered wireless. There's a really big market for wearable electronic 'things' in sport, mainly to capture and display sensor data. Personal Area Networking has become a mundane reality for serious cyclists, many of whom have half a dozen sensors strapped to themselves and their bike. Most serious runners and triathletes are using GPS enabled watches from the likes of Garmin and Suunto, usually with multiple wireless sensors.

The ANT+ wireless standard is well established, with a huge range of products available. Of the top ten finishers in last year's Tour de France, nine were using ANT+. An ANT+ sensor can run for years on a coin cell battery, versus hours at best for Bluetooth. Texas Instruments already manufacture ANT+ chipsets and are currently launching an integrated ANT+ and Bluetooth chip.

This stinks of a missed opportunity. Rather than providing a way in to a large existing market, TI and Fossil are expecting developers to take a punt on a product that has repeatedly failed.

when i was looking for a sleep monitor, i considered fitbit and wakemate. wakemate uses bluetooth and its battery lasts about 24 hours (about 3 nights).

the fitbit tracker uses ant+ and its battery lasts a week or two, even with all of the extra monitoring it does throughout the day (as a pedometer) and wireless synching every time i'm near the base station. i was going so long between charges that i'd forget about it, so i made the fitbit low battery notifier (http://fitbit.jcs.org/) to send me a text message when the battery was low.

from what i've heard, fitbit will be extending their products to include heartrate monitors and other things using ant+.

There is an OpenChronos firmware extension which contains a sleep phase detector. Apparently (I haven't checked it) it works in connection with a PC running a clock program.

https://github.com/poelzi/OpenChronos

Is this just an http://getinpulse.com with an accelerometer and an extra $50 on the price tag?

inPulse seems to have an avid development community already, and I would go so far as to say that the $150 inPulse (without the accelerometer) is a more appropriate starting point for a wrist watch that can be customized. Sure there is a lot you could do with motion sensors, but this is a niche market already, and kicking the price up for a flashy feature seems fruitless to me.

Worth keeping an eye on for the hardware hackers out there, but I think I am leaning inPulse.

Yup! It's pretty cool to see our inPulse community grow. Check out this hacker who decided to write a watchapp-a-day for 30 days: http://osresearch.tumblr.com/

Fossil entering the hacker market is interesting; it's great to see the smartwatch market heat up!

Been following the blog - currently using "word-clock". This watch face is the best conversation piece I've ever worn.

This watch totally revitalized my BlackBerry experience.

I had hoped that the all digital display one would be less dorky looking. As it is, I can't help but think that it looks like a modernized Radio Shack calculator watch. Digital watches always seem to suffer from poor aesthetics.

I know it's not fair, but when I read this all I could think about was Douglas Adams' description of "...an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

They'll need a killer app to get any traction.

EDIT: On second thoughts maybe all they need are skins and screensavers.

It is interesting, though, that we've pretty much gone off digital watches since that was written in the early 80s.

I was watching an early 80s James Bond movie recently and shocked to see that even James fricking Bond wore a digital watch in those days.

I'm actually pretty excited about this. I think anybody whose heart stirs a little when they see a calculator watch can understand the appeal. It's a gap in the market (if you can call it a market...) and an area the DIY community can't really tackle, since to get a practical form factor you need some pretty serious manufacturing capability.

An ipod nano on a watchstrap is not really any kind of competition; yes it has better specs but you're not intended to be able to reprogram it. TI's previous watch offering caught my attention, but the display on it was quite limited. There's really a lot of scope for imaginative projects on this thing.

There is suprisingly little information on their site, considering it is due for release on June 30th (even that date isn't on their site, but on their distributor's product page.) The cost will be $199.

I imagine that developer information will come during/after Google IO this week, as right now, there are just six marketing bullet points on the site.

The distributor's page does have a little more information:

    Add your own thread to the watch for special functions
    Use the Meta Watch low-power application framework
    No need to open the watch for in-circuit debugging
    Uses TI SPI-BY-Wire
    Leverage the Bluetooth radio and remote protocol for communication
    Sample code which is an Open Source Android SDK project demonstrating watch connectivity to an Android phone.  The project demonstrates watch idle screen use as well as notifications for:  CallerID, SMS messages, alarms, calendar events, music control, email and IM.

Here is a little more information:

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-W...

Sorry I should have linked in my original comment, that's the page I was looking at to get the launch date and the extra SDK information. It's still very scarce, though.

This looks quite cool, a bit daring to come out with two different form factors immediately. I can imagine that an application designed for the digital watch's 96x96-pixel screen doesn't port naturally to the analog/digital hybrid (a.k.a. "grown-up watch", heh) model's dual 80x16-pixel screens.

Haven't checked the SDK though, perhaps they've handled this split and abstracted it away.

Personally I also find the "whoa we're revolutionary, clearly that means we must have a fake-Russian design" thinking quite tiring.

Might be daring, but this isn't Fossil's first attempt at a watch with some kind of net connectivity. Remember Microsoft SPOT?

http://reviews.cnet.com/watches-and-wrist-devices/fossil-wri...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Technolo...

Compared to SPOT, I can't decide if this has better or worse connectivity - yes, its bluetooth and I can run whatever I want over it. But its only going to go as far as my phone/laptop. So why not just interact with my phone or laptop? From the "always online" perspective, it feels kinda precariously balanced in a fairly narrow gap between "checking the screen of my phone" and "feeling the incoming-message vibration in my pocket". Is that worth a few hundred dollars?

I'm interested to see what other apps arise that don't require some permanent connection to another device, though.

I know that some people feel they still need a watch, either as a status symbol or because they feel it's more subtle in a meeting to glance at your watch than your smartphone, and for them this might be great.

For me, though? I can't say I've fully transitioned to the post-PC era, but I definitely entered the post-watch era quite some time ago.

(Aside: thinking about some sort of crossover of watches and smartphones makes me imagine a pocketwatch where the watch is an iPod nano and the chain is a pair of earbuds, modified so that the earbuds can lock on to each other and thereby clip the pocketwatch to your clothes. Might be nifty.)

I have neither a smartphone nor a watch, but I guess I would prefer a watch because neither the manufacturer nor a third party are very likely to track me or do any other kind of spying on me. YMMV.

If your everyday activities sufficiently interesting to bother spying on, then someone will find a way to spy on you anyway. If they aren't, then I doubt anyone will ever bother to sift through the data to find precisely when you went to the supermarket.

That would probably be true if sifting through these data were a very complicated and thus costly thing to do. But is isn't, especially since you can more or less to it for all of your targets simultaneously. And there is good reason to do it, too: profiles of people are a valuable resource.

That line of reasoning neglects the existence of automated data analysis. Not all spying comes with a spy these days.

I kinda agree with you from the opposite perspective. I wear a watch because watches look cool. But a high-tech watch doesn't look cool, it looks completely naff, and anyone sufficiently unconcerned about looking naff to wear a smartphone-watch won't bother to wear a watch at all.

I'm also quite interested to know on the analogue one if the hands are controllable from the microcontroller, and if so, how much - eg. can they just be made to tick forward one tick, or can they be spun wildly backwards and forwards to indicate interesting analogue quantities that are not the current time?

Now that is a killer idea. Something as simple as showing the hands count down to your next calendar event would be way more useful on a wrist than checking the phone.

IT makes an embedded watch kit. http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos?DCMP=C...

yes, i was wondering if this is the same thing in a new package? didn't that one sell out like crazy when it was first launched? i suspect this will too.

I heard from someone that it sold out. But I've seen pretty much no "hacker presence" online - which suggests lots of people bought them and then put them in the drawer, or use them as something mundane rather than worth writing about online.

yeah, i only remember the initial fuss - can't remember seeing any results.

That should be "TI [Texas Instruments] makes an embedded watch kit".

This watch and the Chronos are made by the same manufacturer.

The site shows two watches and one of them looks like it has an e-ink display and no OLEDs. The "Digital with 96x96 reflective / always on display technology". That sounds and looks a lot like e-ink.

Seiko and others have also released watches with e-paper displays: http://www.seikowatches.com/baselworld/2010/precon/0402-epd....

I think the technology is already beyond this, and that an ipod nano in a watch form-factor, with the power of one or two generation old iPod Touch, is just around the corner.

Look at the popularity of the TikTok/lunaTik: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunati...

Generally the tiktok reviews have been: cool idea but you need to touch the watch to activate the screen which cripples it.

Metawatch promises always on with it's OLEDs so you can... know what the temperature is at the airport. Pretty sad 1/3 of their breakthrough products display is a waste of cycles weather widget.

I wouldn't call that a waste; you no longer have to look up to know if it's sunny.

Sounds like an e-ink display, not OLED. On the website it says there are two platform, and for only one of them does it say OLED.

TI has had a similar looking programmable watch out before. Going by what's available on google searching for people developing with that one, there was no uptake at all. I wonder if that will happen for this one too?

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos

I own two of these, and yes, they're quite limited.

The MSP430(BT5190) in this watch (requisite to run the CC2560 Bluetooth chipset) is a bit more than the MSP430 in the EZ430-Chronos.

The MSP430BT5190 comes with a FreeRTOS port. (Very) Likely this is what is used for the Fossil watch as well.

If you can't get the price below $199 I can't imagine anyone buying this thing. Stack it next to an iPod Touch which retails for $230 and we'll see who goes for the watch. I think the era of Brookstone and The Sharper Image "neato gadget comes at a premium" is dead, but this thing harkens back to a simpler time.

It's not dead. Apple just cornered that market.

I'll buy a bluetooth watch as as soon as it has a speaker and a mic. Apart from the occasional "Dick Tracy" "head"set usage, this would be quite useful for recording meetings or notes to yourself.

This does look cool, but I'm torn - I find something really attractive in its antithesis: beautifully designed purely mechanical watches that only do one thing and do it without electronics or batteries or Bluetooth connectivity. Self contained, intricate and simple at the same time. This watch will never have the same aesthetics even if it does have a Dick Tracey vibe to it.

alas, that won't implement the killer app of weather-on-your-watch.

no wait: http://www.watchestobuy.com/RevueThommenAirspeedAltimeter.ht...

Looking forward to their announcements about improved walkie-talkies, advancements in CB radio design, and nano-polymer typewriter ribbons.

While I appreciate your choice of examples to make your point, I'm not convinced that pulling a slab of electronics out of your pocket every time you need to know the local time is already the peak of perfection.

So of course strapping a slab of metal and electronics to your wrist is the optimal solution.

I thought wristwatches were dying, like newspapers, books, snail mail etc. Am I wrong? I can't seem to google anything on the topic.

A lot of people I know don't wear a watch, so yes, I believe that watches are becoming more of a niche thing.

As for the optimality of the solution: of course wristwatches aren't perfect. Let's just not sound silly twenty years from now when everyone is wearing brain implants (or a nuclear-powered fax machine necklace).

I'd prefer e-ink.

I guess watches won't be allowed during school exams in a near future.

Does anyone know if it comes with a networking stack?

SPOT watch ver.2: D.O.A.

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