If you're unable to ship PineTime to your country and if you're looking for a watch to tinker with checkout wasp-os[1] project which runs micropython on some easily available NRF52832 devices.
Also Aaron's ATCWatch[2] which runs Arduino compatbile firmware on the aforementioned devices and more; His Daflasher app has made it possible to flash firmware to to NRF52832 devices without any HW tinkering.
Is there any such device with an OLED or e-ink display? All of the above mentioned have IPS panels and things like watchy with an eink display are not really for fitness tracking and don’t have a HR monitor.
I wish there was a Pebble in 2021.
As the owner of several "smartwatch" with a transflective display (Pebble, Pebble Steel, Pebble Time Steel and Amazfit Bip), it does make a huge difference in battery life and I wouldn't downgrade to a smartwatch with a battery life of under a week.
As far as I can tell the Amazfit Blip is the latest with a transflective display. If there was an option to install a different OS on it, I would love to use one.
The NRF52832 watches are pretty much just limited to satisfy some modding curiosities, Many don't even come with a proper HW step counter.
I would love an E-Ink watch to tinker with at this price point too, But there's a thread every other week on HN discussing why rolling out devices with E-Ink by small companies is extraordinarily difficult.
3 days ago- 'Challenges Building an Open-Source E Ink Laptop'[1]
> "According to conversations I’ve had, the minimum order quantity(MOQ) required for purchase at one time is between 10,000 to 50,000"
In the comments of the same discussion[1],
> "During the initial prototyping(MNT Reform) this was one of the options we considered, but back then it would have been prohibitively expensive and we decided to focus on an IPS display and to get to ship a viable product as quickly as possible -- with a tiny team."
> minimum order quantity(MOQ) required for purchase at one time is between 10,000 to 50,000
Yes, that's quite reasonable. Approaching E Ink would be the equivalent of approaching Intel's tier 1 supply chain and asking what's their MOQ. You wouldn't expect them to sell you 1 unit would you? Like all display manufacturers, they also have distributors that supply the various tiers. At the lowest value tier is the individual customers (ie: developers) who cost the most to support and provide the least profit. So expect pricing to match that value level. It is the same for Samsung. Same for LG.
What I perceive is some kind of entitlement syndrome (that's the feeling I get when reading that blog, it was also the same blog that alleged E Ink was abusing patents based on an HN post and when I challenged it, they finally relented and marked it as "unproven" ) where product ideation people (that blog author for example) think that display companies somehow owe them support. They get hundreds of these kinds of messages all the time from universities, research organizations, educational organizations, product startups all demanding responses and attention but mostly unwilling to pay for it. The reality of the display market is that unless you're coming to a display company with a MOQ or a strong value proposition, you can be certain they'll either ignore you or ask you to talk to one of their lowest tier distributors.
and if you look underneath it, you'll see my comment asking for evidence which OP never responded to. I'm very suspicious of such unsubstantiated claims. I work in the display industry, not at E Ink, but have some experience with using their products commercially as well. As far as I can tell, they're a typical display manufacturer and orient themselves towards their high volume customers. Same as everybody else. If you are a company buying anything less than a hundred thousand displays a year, you shouldn't have any expectation of Samsung or LG or any other display company being willing to listen to or enable your development plans. You buy from lower tier distributors just like everyone else. If there's a market shortage, yes, you'll be the first to feel the pinch because top tier vendors will always have their quantities satisfied first. That's what everybody in the industry does because that's the rational thing to do.
Honestly, I know nothing about the e-ink industry. What I see though is that every new device on the market has plenty of comments like "I wish it had e-ink display" and yet there are no affordable devices like this. I am sure there is a huge market for it, so where are they? I can only think of one reason: patents.
> ... yet there are no affordable devices like this.
Watchy costs about $60 [0]. There is also a dude who put together a guide with how to make one yourself and even lists the components [1]. An e-ink display for his watch costs about $10 at aliexpress. (The components are pretty similar, screen likely the same one.)
If it is possible for some dude on the internet to build their own smartwatch and a crowd funding campaign to do it on a slightly bigger scale, why are not more manufacturers doing it? That is really what I am wondering about. The whole "screen supply" argument seems like it is a non-issue. Is it really patents?
Maybe an e-ink screen is just too boring compared to an Apple Watch's OLED screen?
The other question is why are transflective LCD's so rare? Googling for it, literally only Amazfit seems to still make them.
> the market has plenty of comments like "I wish it had e-ink display" and yet there are no affordable devices like this
> I am sure there is a huge market for it, so where are they? I can only think of one reason: patents.
That's the equivalent of saying, "I wish it had transparent OLED display and yet there are no affordable devices like this". A good analogy would be like looking at the sports car market, and saying Ferraris aren't affordable because of patents. There's numerous reasons why display companies like E Ink and others are unable to make such panels "affordable" because their costs are higher than said price. The dominant reason that I'm aware of is volume. If you're not producing at least a million displays a month, then you can't justify building up a bespoke production line so instead you'll have to repurpose a modified LCD production line for your product and so you'll have lower yields. At larger sizes, you'll even have to kerf by hand. Don't even start thinking about laminating touchscreens, as you'll then start dropping your yields further. It is simple to prove this. Look at E Ink display pricing between say 2002 and today. Their sweetspot is the Amazon sized display and that price has declined dramatically because they achieved volume for only that display. Everything else has stayed around the same price or some have even gone up in price since there's no volume around it. People aren't interested in paying 6 grand for a 32 inch black and white panel and nobody is willing to pony up an order for a million of those even if they could get the price down to 1 grand. No volume, no affordable price. That's the simple truth of the display industry. Patents barely have any effect as far as I can tell. Everybody in the industry has them.
I am not super into the smart watch stuff but I do like what PinePhone is trying to do.
Hopefully I can get a few more years out of my oneplus and then maybe the mobile linux distros and hardware will have matured enough that they are a viable alternative to android.
The pinetime is almost identical with the Colmi P8. The P8 is about $30 and has a worse motion sensor, but is otherwise nearly the same, is easy to get, and is supported by most pinetime operating systems
Would have been nice if there was some kind of unbrickable bootloader for the sealed version. Many other devices have, for example, usb, which would allow for DFU or fastboot.
Also, some more and better health sensors such as spo2.
Buy hey, a trustworthy non-cloud smartwatch for $25 ? Shut up and take my money!
If you modify the bootloader you can brick it. The most likely scenario is that you switch to a different OS, which often requires changing to a modified bootloader, and something goes wrong. But you can't brick it with regular OS or application development
If you really want something really hard to brick, I'd recommend going pinetime with wasp os, that has a bootloader that doesn't even need a working os to be able to flash.
Does anyone know how good and accurate this heart rate monitor? OR know of a good one-time-cost ideally open sport fitness focused watch?
I would LOVE for someone to hack the Whoop. It's not accurate/good enough, nor insightful enough, for me to want to keep paying $30 a month. but a one time cost and an open community to patch it to match individual use cases would be completely worth even a couple hundred upfront.
my experience is it's slow to pickup changes & consistently 5-10 bps lower than other bands / pulse ox.
But my biggest gripes are the auto-sleep detection is horrible for me, and my sport isn't really conducive to the whole value add of measuring 'strain' in the way they do. Doesn't really catch short but very high intensity bouts of work.
So like if I can't get good sleep recommendations or measure my strain/recovery I don't want to pay $30 a month just to see a heart rate pulse on my phone when working out. It hasn't improved my training in a meaningful way.
Since it’s out of stock, I would recommend getting the Colmi P8 from AliExpress. It’s $20 and the hardware is almost identical to the PineTime. InfiniTime and Wasp-OS both run pretty well on mine.
Hardware-wise I would say the different screen with a slightly higher resolution could be an issue, but I have neither watches and don’t know how adaptative OSes like infinitime are.
So, how close are we to living in the 1980s future I grew up with where Penny and Inspector Gadget are seamlessly video chatting through their watches?
The PineTime is a very underpowered device that is really only capable of showing messages from a nearby smartphone. It doesn’t even run Linux, it runs a low-footprint firmware. Don't expect to video chat through it.
The display is controlled over an 8MHz spi bus, you can only write to it as a bitmap (no functions to draw stuff like lines or filled rectangles) you give a square to draw in, and then a rectangle to bitmap to draw in the square. With the speed of the spi bus, the max speed you'll be able to update the entire display at is 8fps.
And to be honest I'm mostly looking for notifications and some info available at a glance when I'm looking at a "smartwatch".
I currently have an Amazfit Bip paired to Gadgetbridge, but I'd definitely like to see something less proprietary on my wrist. Crossing my fingers to see a transflective display version one day for an even longer battery lifetime.
I both do and don't want to believe that someday soon enough a generative AI will be able to take what it knows about me and my mannerisms, and combine that with an image of two of me looking into the camera in the moment, along with my voice audio stream, and out of all of that, create a totally convincing video feed of me speaking for the person on the other end of the call
Checkout their latest update - but basically in the next 3 months I believe. But of course that all depends on the manufacturing situation, you literally have automotive giants pausing production due to shortages.
It doesn't have a transreflective display which provides the gains. I really don't understand why - maybe they are hard to source?
But yeah I would pay a LOT more for an open Amazfit Bip with a great community. To note, the Bip does have an alternative firmware, but its somewhat niche and unknown.
Newer Amazfit devices have a server-side "obsolescence switch" - each time they're repaired they need "activated" via a remote server that uses a proprietary app and account with the server.
There's various ways to do this, like using a Python script to interact with their API, but it's a true anti-feature.
Ideally we'd see an open source version of this kind of device (with the transflective display), or some progress on removing the "pairing lock" from the firmware - I don't think the devices have signed firmwares, so it should be possible to either patch out the check, or replace the validation key with a known key, and generate it locally.
Gadgetbridge is widely under-appreciated open source for these devices, and it's good to see others appreciating its use in liberating these kinds of devices (at least on the phone-side).
Also Aaron's ATCWatch[2] which runs Arduino compatbile firmware on the aforementioned devices and more; His Daflasher app has made it possible to flash firmware to to NRF52832 devices without any HW tinkering.
[1] https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os
[2] https://github.com/atc1441/ATCwatch