PineTime Hermes Firmware + Companion App

[dejvino]

Hi Piners,

Thanks to all the tutorials and discussions on these forums I was able to get into PineTime development and put together a firmware for the watch + a companion phone app. I'd like to give back to the community. Maybe someone would find this useful.

Repository: github.com/Dejvino/pinetime-hermes-firmware

It is still an alpha version, but it serves my needs for the most part:
1) digital watch with time synced from my phone
2) notifications from the phone.

Currently it features two "watchfaces".
Standard HOME watch view:


and a CONSOLE view with a scrolling terminal of notifications:


The companion app is a very crude Android application, though I don't plan on polishing it much. Ultimately I want to create an app for PinePhone. As soon as my BH arrives, that is 

The feature set this firmware provides is tailored to my needs. I plan on daily driving this. Mainly to receive relevant notifications, see calendar events etc. I don't care about e.g. the heart rate sensor. But if you'd like to play around with this, customize it for your own needs, give it a go!

[danielt]

Very nice.

As it happens I'm experimenting with an app system in Python (for no particular reason... just to so how much can be done) and I'm currently working towards something I can use as a daily driver. However I will pay close attention to your companion app though... you're *way* ahead of me there and I see no reason not to cooperate on (or just copy) the BLE protocols so the different efforts can still share companion apps ;-) .

[dejvino]

In an ideal world there'd already be an open source companion app that we could all use. The Bluetooth services interface is pretty standardized, plus a smartwatch is a smartwatch, so there is nothing stopping us there. But I couldn't find anything usable. Anyway it is a good idea to share the app.

[wibble]

bosmoment/PineTime-apps is using a forked GadgetBridge  as an android companion app. From a quick scan it looks to be using GATT so far, while the Bangle.js is using JSON sent over the nRF serial bridge. I don't know the current state of bluetooth support in kdeconnect, or whether interacting with smartwatches is even something they want to do. If a rebble port appears it'll use the pebble methods, also supported in GadgetBridge. In any case some colabouration seems a good thing.

And thanks for sharing your work so far.

[clach04]

This is awesome!

I have a couple of rock64 boards, I do not have a PineTime but I'm monitoring with interest (I'm still using a Pebble Time watch, I bought a bunch off ebay as nothing out there comes close to the functionality I want - the PineTime is looking interesting - I'm super excited for possible micropython support).

I've used GadgetBridge - its pretty solid and stable. I encourage you to take a look at it. Its been around a while. One gotcha is that it doesn't have any kind of internet/network access - which is fine for plain notifications but if you want to do anything more complicated it can be limited (at least for Pebble users who are used to having internet access).

[dejvino]

GadgetBridge sounds like just the thing I was looking for. I'll look into it and try to make it work together, thanks!