Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

For those considering purchasing - as a Watchy owner - if you're looking for a polished smartwatch product that you can put on your wrist and not think about how it works - this isn't that product. It's still rough around the edges, uploading new watchfaces takes some work, phone notifications aren't implemented yet, no case, etc.

But if you're intrigued by the idea of hacking on ESP32s, WiFi, BLE and/or e-ink, as a wearable hackable dev device, Watchy can't be beat. It's a lot of fun. Think of it as a wifi/BLE-enabled Arduino on your wrist.

The ESP32 is a pretty serious power hog...

Walled-gardens have made it really hard to do novel things in your personal digital life

My guess is that you will need to have it serviced somewhere in that time period.

I am with you in regards to how great an automatic watch is, but unless your seiko has an oil-free escapement of some kind, e.g. silicon or DLC coated, 40 years seems like a stretch.

https://www.rwsmithwatches.com/journal/roger-announces-nano-...

https://www.sinn.de/en/DIAPAL.htm

Conversely, I'm not keen on the idea of having to manually wind my watch, or remembering to fix the date at the start of every month.

More options is good for everyone though, so I'm glad both exist!

I am making a list of things along similar lines i.e. devices that do one or two things really well, preferably mechanical, well-built etc.. Suggestions?

I guess it's a bit like the itch of building your own desk or some beautiful wooden furniture - I like the idea of slowly refining my own watch software until it's perfectly suited for me.

About the Pebble -- I am definitely a fan, and haven't yet seen another smartwatch with its particular appeal. After playing around with a lot of watchfaces I ended up almost always sticking with an analog face which I'm finding helps me visualize the passage of time a lot better than a digital readout.

It is interesting, given the amount of environmental concerns people have over cow flatulates, plastic bags, straws, etc... that nobody seems concerned about these obviously short-lifetime hunks of non-biodegradable/non-recyclable plastics, rubber, silicone, rare earth metals, and worse.

All the environmentalists that scream at others for putting a can in the wrong bin, yet buy a new Apple Watch every release cycle...

If we could get the terminology straightened out, maybe every discussion on the topic of smartwatches need not require the presence of "that guy" telling us how in addition to not owning a TV, they just need a mechanical time-keeping device they can pass to their kids who are just going to sell it at the estate sale.

Bah, a real curmudgeon would have said a £10 Casio quartz :-)

I flick back and forth on this. The features i actually use on my Apple Watch:

    1. it extends phone battery life[1]
    2. I'm UK based but i work with colleagues across APAC & NA - in 3 of the corners of the "infograph" watch face i have NYC, Mumbai & HK times, it shows the city, the 24hr time & handily the offset - i use this all the time because outlook is poor for this simple use case
    3. The 4th corner has a timer - i use it for everything from "the dog's out the back garden, i should remember to let her back in, in 5 mins" to brewing a cuppa to reminding me to do something - the UI here is really good, i'm a mixture of "hey siri, set a timer for 25 minutes" vs. just tapping one of the pre-set timers
    4. Up next calendar entry - coupled with calendar notifications, the only notifications i still use today
    5. Day date complication
    6. Temperature - but it's not the current temp i find useful, it's the daily range display - every night "can i let the cat stay out overnight or will it get too cold?"
    7. it's super convenient for driving directions in a rental car when abroad, not so much in my own car though
    8. Music / audiobook / podcast volume & skipping
    9. The vo2 max readout has caused me to change exercise habits and the HRV thing has caused me to pay more attention to my sleep schedule - he says at 11:26pm
   10. But my favourite is Apple Pay, personal account, joint account, corporate card & flight tickets back when we used to do that, super handy

    1. Every other thing on there - from sleep trackers to camera viewfinder remote view thingy (cool, but useless)

[1] in 2017 when i got my 2nd gen apple watch, my iPhone 7 would be almost dead when i got home from work. When i started using the apple watch, my phone battery would have ~20% left when i got home. I was no longer wakening the phone screen to deal with notifications or fiddling with podcast / music controls. Shortly after that i disabled all notifications but that's another story.

I can see who is calling me without pulling my phone out of my pocket and drop the call. I can also answer calls on it if I left my phone in the other room.

Ditto with text messages

I can see what my next meeting is just by looking at the watch face.

As for e-waste - yeah - replacing the battery costs almost as much as a new watch. Though my last one lasted 4 years.

I actually never use it to tell the time, which I know is weird.

Your Raspberry Pi will be e-waste in 30 years too...

1. The current crop of smart watches felt bulky. I know the newer apple watches are quite slim but they don't suit my tech ecosystem, but the android/etc offerings just feel 'big'. I know this will improve as time goes on of course. (I do have a gshock which I love, but that's another matter)

2. (And this is the main point,) the smart watches made me feel like it was increasing my anxiety. Even though you can disconnect the watch from notifications, having various alerts and things happening all the time with haptic feedback was making me look at the watch more often, fidget with it, and use it as that kind of social escape thing that you do with phones. Once you disable the 'smart' features, it becomes nothing more than a gimmick, and when using the features it seemed to equally help my productivity the same amount that it hindered it.

I don't want to knock anyone who uses a smart watch though, because I do think they're cool. They just so far haven't worked for me.

i agree, smartwatches that can't replace my phone are not interesting. but if they could replace the phone that would be a different thing entirely.

to put it differently:

i need a cheap portable phone for my children, one that i can control 100%. besides telling the time and setting alarms it must not have any features except calling or sending (and receiving) voice messages home.

nothing that attracts kids to play with the device and interfere with class.

it doesn't have to be a watch, but it needs to be small, lightweight, easy to carry, and appear uninteresting.

even a feature phone has to many features.

and it must be affordable to families with multiple kids (less than $50)

those devices do exist, at that price level too. if only they were hackable so i could control what the kids can do with it...

Week-long battery and always-on screen are critical "watch" functionality that too many modern smartwatches fail on, and pebble succeeded on.

For me, it was a watch that I could get notifications on, including turn by turn directions which was super useful when cycling.

I hadn't bothered with watches at all until I got into running, as there are clocks everywhere including on my phone in my pocket.

Though I only use that for specific things (telling the time, pace tracking, and breadcrumb mapping when following a trail route or otherwise in an unfamiliar location).

> All these devices will be e-waste in 30 years (most in less than 10).

Even 10 is a very generous estimate IMO. Even though I'm a light user I've gone through a few in the last six or seven years. First was a gps-only-when-paired-with-a-phone-step-counter-otherwise fitbit thing (given to a cousin when I got my next device), I had a Band2 but not long before MS gave up on that (it went on eBay, I doubt anyone is still using it), one TomTom died, the replacement is now a spare (may soon be donated to a friend who is getting into running), the Garmin I currently use is likely to be replaced this year (I'm sliding down the off-road ultra-running rabbit hole and don't have a great sense of direction, so extra battery life on those "not getting lost" features will be handy! (while pretty good at reorienting myself with a map, the watching beeping before I go far enough off course to need to is very useful)) and demoted to being my spare.

And I'm using it as a utility device - people buying them mostly as toys or fashion/showyness probably upgrade even more often (or just bore of, and stop using, them sooner). Even accounting for selling/donating the old device after an upgrade, I'd say most will be abandoned in significantly less than a decade. Much like phones.

This product linked is more of a toy to play with and not what you would use daily.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612223

Hardware wise, display and touch sensor is quite good and I was surprised that I was able to type with 90% accuracy on a tiny qwerty keyboard. The tiny speaker is very low quality and not really usable for speech. There's also a vibration motor, acceleration sensor and IR transmitter (not sure if it can receive, schematics are not available).

I was disappointed by the battery and even more with clumsy charging (micro USB with plastic cover) that I could not see myself using daily. The documentation is very thin and the digging soon hits docs written in Chinese.

I enjoyed the blog post that walks through watch's hardware and brings it to life: https://nick.zoic.org/art/lilygo-ttgo-t-watch-2020/

Community is fragmented across C / MicroPython / Arduino / Scratch environments, as well as across different variants of TTGO watch. It's not too hard to find examples online, but putting them together into something useful takes time and effort.

I chose T-Watch over Watchy because the touchscreen should allow for far richer interaction than 4 side buttons. On the other hand my watch is at the moment loaded with useless and too slow firmware that hangs after few minutes of use. I purchased the T-Watch without any delusions that I'm getting a functional watch. It works well as an isolated handheld ESP32 development platform.

Just measured it at 9.3mm thickness with the battery - but it has no case.

I ended up buying a Garmin Venu SQ with the following plan: - Use the Garmin Connect app without giving it permission to upload data. This makes the app basically useless expect for managing some settings and creating custom workouts on the device. - Use workoutizer (a pip package) to process my activity data. Workoutizer should be able to import the files from the garmin device and create some nice visuals from them. - For non-activity related data (ie. Sleep and continuos hearth rate monitoring) I am considering two options: 1) Ensuring that Gadgetbridge has support for the Garmin device. 2) Extending workoutizer so that it can also process other kinds of data (assuming that I can fetch that data directly from the device as well).

For a more user-friendly alternative you might look into devices that are already supported by Gadgetbridge (my other option was buying an Amazfit GTS 2e which is already supported by Gadgetbridge).

Still, I was bumped that there is not option that allows this out-of-the-box. But I think that I can get it working for me, without having to upload all my data to Garmin :)

Of course, you could buy an Android watch or an Apple watch and program your own apps.

Walking a block in the wrong direction before figuring it out was not worth going without.

I really wish NYC would paint or engrave a N/S/E/W indicator on the sidewalk at every subway exit.

There's an opportunity there! I have no doubt it will happen. Who, how etc? We'll see.