Smartwatch

Mission Operations
1

Replaced battery on Pebble, but key stuck down

Bangle.js 2.

Very friendly person, good gadgetbridge support, multiple alarms, but apparently the vibration isn’t very strong, not enough to wake.

Pinetime

doesn’t seem to support multiple alarms at the moment, which is a main usecase for me. Vibration is apparently pretty good though.

Fitbit

Used to be able to set up alarms in the app, used to have strong vibration motors. However, now alarms can only be set on the device itself.

Bought an older Mi Band 6, we’ll see how that works

2

Been using the Mi Band 6 to wake me up

I’m very satisfied with the bangle as a Pebble replacement.
the vibration is a little on the weak side - with the pattern set up right it does seem to fairly reliably catches my attention. uncomfortable to sleep with the default band in a way the pebble wasn’t,

3

I had great luck connecting the bangle to my chromebook for use with the app loader.

bought the cheapest bluetooth adapter off ebay so I could use my desktop to develop apps. aparently chrome for linux doesn’t support web bluetooth out of the box, enabled the chrome flag - it connects, but can’t load any apps, thing times out. might just be a flaky bluetooth adapter, or maybe web bluetooth isn’t set.

4

to edit and upload code, use either

https://www.espruino.com/ide/?codeurl=https://banglejs.com/apps/apps/notifyfs/notify.js&upload&emulator

https://www.espruino.com/ide/?codeurl=https://banglejs.com/apps/apps/todolist/app.js

5

holy hell I’m impressed with the toolchain on bangle2.

  • everything being an interpreted language means it’s trivial to edit any of the behaviors of any of the code, even basic graphics library stuff
  • and yet, it’s not like the pebble where you could only keep 8 apps and you were out of space - the resources available feel huge
  • just overwrote something on the boot, long pressed, pressed More…, Reinstall Apps, and everything was back
6

the bangle 2 with the stock strap was too uncomfortable to use while sleeping, unlike my pebble.

I hear fabric straps are good for sleeping while wearing.

watch strap for my old pebble was from https://www.archerwatchstraps.com/

I now have a vibrating bed shaker that fills some of the gap that pebble used to.

7

the Bangle 2 died a few months ago. “btn1 stuck down” failure mode, bootlooping. Most likely water damage (even though I had sealed the barometer port with silicone and was careful not to expose it to water). a great tragedy.

8

on Wed. this week I missed a meeting partly because I didn’t have a functioning smartwatch the last few months.

9

Set up the Mi Band 6 again as the backup. lost a bit of nerd cred but that’s fine.

(note to self: I bought two vendors (bangle and mi band) at the same time, wasn’t sure which one would fit the bill. that was a fruitful strategy, I was able to evaluate both simultaneously. good to keep in mind in the future.)

10

Mi Band configuration

  • GadgetBridge

Helpful to set Outlook →Calendar →Sync Calendars toggle, which lets gadgetbridge sync the reminder alarms.