You must have gotten a weird Garmin that doesn't suit your needs then. Why did you get a Garmin with a touch screen, when you really wanted buttons and Garmin offers watches with buttons?
And I believe the GPS sync is necessary when you don't have an internet connection on the watch.
My Garmin Forerunner has everything the author claims doesn't exist except the hackability: Long (10 day) battery life, reflective screen (plus background light), physical buttons, all the features (step count, notifications, music control, weather, etc. plus lots of additional sport functions and even a pulse and oxygen sensor.
However, I still get the point of having a hackable device.
They are nice, but they are no Pebble.
Garmin feel like a gadget you bought and are stuck with what you got.
Pebble started ok, it was the first attempt. The first UI basically scrolled through watch faces which I wasn't a fan of, but it was the first real Smart watch so experiments were required.
Then they put out the new UI that is used today, it's fast, cool playful animations, easy to navigate, had calendar, steps, sleep tracking and heart rate right at your finger tips (still better than today's watches). The navigation buttons blow away any other watch, long press customization is amazing, app store, etc.
Garmin, once you pull it out of the box, you got what you got. Pebble, everything the newest watch got, the old one did too (as long as the required sensor existed) and GAINED performance through the years. Not to mention the 10's of thousands of apps that gave you so much functionality.
I still think the Rebble store gives Google and Apple a run for their money... After 9 years of Pebble being "dead"
That's cool, they must be investing more in their watches lately, the couple I had right after Pebble died were very basic. The stuff they did worked well, but they were similar to how you bought a GPS back in the day, what it came with was what you got and there were minor updates and you could get new maps but not much else
While it sure looks like fun, it doesn't really seem useful. All the use cases the author makes are more gimmicks than anything really useful. Actually, the thing influencing compasses seems really annoying. You'll never be able to have your smartphone show the correct walking direction while holding it in the hand with the magnet.
I don't know, all my use cases where I needed GPIO are better satisfied by an ESP32. If I need more compute, I connect the ESP32 to my server via the internet.
Makes sense for many applications. But what if you are building an autonomous flying drone? That's the kind of application at which RPi shines, to my mind.
(Otherwise, indeed, an ESP32 has rather adequate amounts of compute and RAM for many control applications.)
Unless it processes images on the fly to do some sort of image-based steering or target recognition, an Arduino or comparable microcontroller should be beefy enough [1].
In mobile applications, power consumption of a RPi quickly becomes an issue.
Yes, an autonomous drone would have to process images, height data, map data, etc, so the compute of an RPi would still be relevant. Also, the drone does not have to max out the CPU all the time, it just may need intense compute in some situations, say, depending on the terrain. Larger drones, such as delivery drones, have motors with power consumption that dwarfs that of an RPi. For a a small, palm-sized drone it's of course untenable.
Actually, this is not the case in Germany, as we do not have net metering (feeding into the grid does not give you as much money as consuming from the grid costs).
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