Wow. There is another project doing a similar thing, but they don't have bluetooth nor an OLED display (they reuse the same display) so it's not nearly as useful in daily life, though still very impressive work nonetheless.
But this is really amazing work. I hope you find some collaborators to continue!!
I recently got an F-105W which I had when I was a teen (which is basically the F-91 but with a cool glowy EL backlight). And one thing that really surprised me how small that thing is. It seemed bigger at the time.
I'm really amazed how much technology this project managed to fit in that tiny case. Battery, OLED, bluetooth.. Just wow.
I would pay for this, I was thinking of buying that other project on crowdsupply but without BT connectivity I just don't really have any use for it.
Quick review: I have one of the early units and I've really enjoyed using it. It's totally hackable, well documented, and I fully anticipate using mine for the next decade or longer. It's far from a smartwatch - it's more like you're sitting in on the Casio product meeting where they wrote the original F-91W specs. The year-scale battery life remains, but it comes with the ability to fully customize the watch behavior. For me, that meant adding sunrise/sunset and moon phase faces. I might build a quick-timezone switcher in the future.
No, the other one on crowdsupply that the other person below was talking about. I didn't link to it as it was already mentioned in other places in this thread as well.
oh hey, this is my project! Sensor Watch definitely has different goals — less smart, more watch — but I love this, and I love how the F-91W represents such a blank canvas for folks to project their vision onto. It's small and so very thin (at home on any person's wrist), water-resistant and vaguely indestructible. It's also so inexpensive and ubiquitous that you can take it apart and hack on it without feeling like you're breaking something important, and you can safely assume that anyone in the world can probably grab one at a local store and hack along at home. It's a wonderful object.
This is the barebones Android smart watch I want. As a side note why won't apple make it's watch work well with android - wouldn't that add a few million users? ~ or do they sell it as a loss leader for IOS?
I want a future where we have bare-metal versions of smart watches with low power screens, thin form factor and long battery life compete with full feature dick tracy phone watches.
> As a side note why won't apple make it's watch work well with android
This is the way Apple works. You don't own enough products so you aren't worthy of full functionality. Last time I checked you can't update Airpods firmware without another Apple device nor can you change settings on the pro XDR display without a device running macOS.
> nor can you change settings on the pro XDR display without a device running macOS.
You can't even natively change brightness nor volume on non-Apple displays, even though DDC/CI is a thing and third party apps can do just that. The Mac Mini M1 HDMI port is even crippled at the hardware level and DDC/CI flat out doesn't work there (works fine via USB-C which uses DP).
The usual public rationale from Apple is that a perfect experience can only be achieved within a fully owned ecosystem.
I don't quite buy that the core strategic intent is intentionally using this to push people into owning only/buying more of Apple stuff, I bet it's more about not having to handle dev, fixes, workarounds, and a storm of support cases for third party hardware that may be of less than stellar quality, and then Apple being blamed for things not working.
IOW brand image control + dev resources, not a sales ploy.
This is the way a lot of companies work and have historically worked. Why spend a ton of resources supporting every operating system and hardware combination out there for all of your devices when you have a perfectly good way of doing it in house?
Yeah, for me, what I really want in a smartwatch are the following:
1. long battery life. (as in a week+)
2. Always on display.
3. Notifications. (Ability to display all notifications that make a sound/vibrate in android, ideally also providing access to notification's quick actions, and ability to dismiss notification from phone. It should also provide incoming call notification, with caller name or number and hang-up button support).
4. Media controls for phone. (I don't really care about this, but if a watch lacks it, it would be suspicious).
5. Basic watch functions, like time, date, stopwatch, timer, alarms. (Possibly synchronized with android device, but not is not a requirement).
Beyond those five, things health sensors, app support or whatever are just bonuses.
The display should probably be a reflective display with optional backlight triggered by tilt-to-view, or even a button. It probably should use something like epaper or memory lcd to be low power. Honestly color is not even critical, although would be a nice-to-have.
Pebble came somewhat close, although its notification support was somewhat more limited than I would have liked. But I've seen nothing else since then. Everybody is too focused on apps, fitness sensors, etc, and have laughable battery life, even without an always on display.
You literally just described the Garmin Fenix (or a vast majority of their more affordable options, the Fenix is just the Jack-of-all-trades model).
1) Gets about 14 days with default sensors (HR, GPS, altimeter, barometer, compass, etc) enabled (turning on high resolution Sp02, for instance, will knock it down to 6-8 days)
2) Yup
3) Yup, all features requested
4) Technically, only for a few apps. And it supports Android's media APIs better than Apple's. But they're there. This is probably the weakest supported of your requirements.
5) Admirably.
You might want to give the Amazfit Bip a go, it's as barebones as it gets. The only gripes I have with it is the craptastic app and the lack of vibration, it only has a beeper.
There's an open-source replacement app called gadgetbridge. (I'm not sure it works with the exact model you mention, but I did use it with a cheap Android watch from, iirc, Amazfit.)
> At this point (read more like a year ago) I am burnt out from this project and now I figured to open it up and hopefully more people can be involved.
This is not moving forward, it looks like the author is just lofting it up as a resource for others to use as a starting point for similar projects.
Very interesting. One thing I've pondered - this project contains various pieces of off the shelf hardware, and some custom 3D CAD files. These don't seem to fit as neatly into the way Git functions. Is there/has there been any attempts to replicate Git with Bill of Materials or 3D CAD data?
There are many softwares attempting to solve this problem. Airplanes, bridges, cars, robots, they are catalogued in these systems. They tend to fall under the "Product Lifecycle Management" or 'PLM' name of softwares. Or also "Product Data Management"/'PDM'. Tends to be enterprisey.
You can specify custom diff algorithms to git, so you could say all .dwg files get diffed with something which knows how to parse the binary data and present a reasonable diff between the two versions?
The data for CAD exchange files is usually plain text, the problem is that the exporter doesn't try to preserve the same order of stuff as previous times that it was saved.
I'm almost of the opinion that it should be thrown back on the software to convert their save files to text where possible. Binary files just aren't great for a wide range of issues further than just git.
Readit News
But this is really amazing work. I hope you find some collaborators to continue!!
I recently got an F-105W which I had when I was a teen (which is basically the F-91 but with a cool glowy EL backlight). And one thing that really surprised me how small that thing is. It seemed bigger at the time.
I'm really amazed how much technology this project managed to fit in that tiny case. Battery, OLED, bluetooth.. Just wow.
I would pay for this, I was thinking of buying that other project on crowdsupply but without BT connectivity I just don't really have any use for it.
Quick review: I have one of the early units and I've really enjoyed using it. It's totally hackable, well documented, and I fully anticipate using mine for the next decade or longer. It's far from a smartwatch - it's more like you're sitting in on the Casio product meeting where they wrote the original F-91W specs. The year-scale battery life remains, but it comes with the ability to fully customize the watch behavior. For me, that meant adding sunrise/sunset and moon phase faces. I might build a quick-timezone switcher in the future.
Deleted Comment
https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
It's a pity that shipping and taxes outside the US effectively doubles the price.
Deleted Comment
I want a future where we have bare-metal versions of smart watches with low power screens, thin form factor and long battery life compete with full feature dick tracy phone watches.
This is the way Apple works. You don't own enough products so you aren't worthy of full functionality. Last time I checked you can't update Airpods firmware without another Apple device nor can you change settings on the pro XDR display without a device running macOS.
You can't even natively change brightness nor volume on non-Apple displays, even though DDC/CI is a thing and third party apps can do just that. The Mac Mini M1 HDMI port is even crippled at the hardware level and DDC/CI flat out doesn't work there (works fine via USB-C which uses DP).
The usual public rationale from Apple is that a perfect experience can only be achieved within a fully owned ecosystem.
I don't quite buy that the core strategic intent is intentionally using this to push people into owning only/buying more of Apple stuff, I bet it's more about not having to handle dev, fixes, workarounds, and a storm of support cases for third party hardware that may be of less than stellar quality, and then Apple being blamed for things not working.
IOW brand image control + dev resources, not a sales ploy.
1. long battery life. (as in a week+) 2. Always on display. 3. Notifications. (Ability to display all notifications that make a sound/vibrate in android, ideally also providing access to notification's quick actions, and ability to dismiss notification from phone. It should also provide incoming call notification, with caller name or number and hang-up button support). 4. Media controls for phone. (I don't really care about this, but if a watch lacks it, it would be suspicious). 5. Basic watch functions, like time, date, stopwatch, timer, alarms. (Possibly synchronized with android device, but not is not a requirement).
Beyond those five, things health sensors, app support or whatever are just bonuses.
The display should probably be a reflective display with optional backlight triggered by tilt-to-view, or even a button. It probably should use something like epaper or memory lcd to be low power. Honestly color is not even critical, although would be a nice-to-have.
Pebble came somewhat close, although its notification support was somewhat more limited than I would have liked. But I've seen nothing else since then. Everybody is too focused on apps, fitness sensors, etc, and have laughable battery life, even without an always on display.
https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/
https://banglejs.com/
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy
This is not moving forward, it looks like the author is just lofting it up as a resource for others to use as a starting point for similar projects.
Deeply heartfelt thanks to the original author for taking it this far.
Hackaday is something I'd definitely recommend to the average HN reader if they like the hardware side of things.
I'd also recommend N-O-D-E's channel for anyone interested in such things, here's his video on his F91 mod: https://youtu.be/cvtvm7N_qj4