3. PineTime $25 FOSS smart watch

PineTime $25 FOSS smart watch

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    It seems our friends at @PINE64 are working on yet another FOSS-friendly device in yet another form factor, this one to go on your wrist.

    Dimensions:

    • 37.5mm (wide?)
    • 40mm (tall?)
    • 11mm thick
    • 20mm straps (appears to use standard springbars)
    • 38g (watch head only, it seems)

    Construction:

    • Plastic and zinc alloy
    • Water resistance of 1m (IP67) on final watch, not prototypes - (Watch people: note that water resistance ratings for electronic and traditional watches are defined differently and are not directly equivalent.)

    Hardware:

    • 1.3" IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 240x240, 65K colors (about 260 dpi if my math is right)
    • NORDIC Semiconductor nRF52832 SoC (final product may use nRF52840)
    • 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU
    • 512KB Flash, 64KB DRAM on SoC
    • Additional 8MB Flash (final product may use 16MB Flash)
    • Bluetooth 5 (including Low Energy)
    • Accelerometer
    • Heart rate sensor
    • Vibrator motor for notifications
    • 170-180mAh lithium polymer battery, hoping to provide ten day battery life, minimum of one week
    • USB A charger

    Potential open source real time operating systems:

    Pricing and availability:

    • Expected price with charger of $23
    • Straps to be offered from $2 and up
    • Possible to manufacture as early as January, 2020, but availability will wait until OSes are ready for it and PinePhone OSes are ready to work with it.
    • Availability lifespan 5+ years
    • Dev kits shipped to developers in October, 2019
    • Dev kits may be opened up for general order, though as of Pine64's November update, that hasn't been decided yet

    General:

    • Brainchild of Pine64's Lukasz Erecinski (Thank you, Lukasz!)
    • A side project of Pine64, with no particular deadlines, and lower priority than PinePhone, PineBooks, etc. Its development will not interfere with those other projects
    • Core functionality hoped to be Pebble-like
    • Intended as a companion for Linux smartphones for notifications, etc., not a smartphone replacement (as evinced by the hardware specs, the latter wouldn't be realistic)

    Relevant links:

    Pine64 forum thread
    Pine64 wiki page
    Pine64 wiki comparison of PineTime OSes
    Pine64 October, 2019 update
    Pine64 November, 2019 update

    Prototype on wrist:
    Prototype showing a test screen

    It's a real watch already, less than a month after the development kits shipped! Here seen running TinyGo:
    Prototype running TinyGo displaying the time

    Prototype USB charger:
    Prototype USB charger

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  • I am really looking forward to this!

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  • T

    OP updated with a lot more info @PINE64 posted to their Wiki, forum, and October blog update. I'm sure there are a ton more details on IRC and/or Telegram/Matrix, but I've unfortunately not had the time lately to follow the chats. If you see anything notable I've missed, please let me know, and I will add it.

    As both a watch fan and a smart watch fan, I find the PineTime very exciting, and I look forward to seeing what developers of the various RTOSes can do with this hardware. The hardware may not look very powerful, but I'm sure there are many on this forum old enough to remember when the PineTime would have seemed like a supercomputer. With luck, the PineTime can prove out this space for more future FOSS-powered options.

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  • Thanks for posting this 🙂 If someone is potentially interested in working on the UT companion app for the watch let me know. There is no rush - the watch doesn't have an OS and won't have one for some time.

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  • @PINE64 There is a group interested in building a companion app for AsteroidOS, so I see a lot of overlap. The matrix group is here: #UBports_AsteroidOS:matrix.org
    @stefwe is doing most of the work there and I helped with the Pebble companion app (RockWork), so let us know if we can do some collaboration! I'm very excited for the PineTime and PinePhone!

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  • One of the big challenges is that Apps in UT have no full control over bluetooth connections and therefore I am not sure how far this can succeed with the current SDK. But maybe others know more.

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    OP updated. Not a ton of new info, but it sure is nice to see that it's already a working watch a month after the dev kits shipped!

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