How do I easily charge the watch?

[danielt]

I originally just balanced a paper weight on it but I'm trying to develop on it now and its useful to charge it and interact with the screen so I cut a couple of tiny clamps on a laser cutter.


PineTime glue free charging case

please post your design files!

Take a look at https://github.com/daniel-thompson/laser-lab (it is in the parts directory).

[johns]

I just use a rubber band.

Me too.

[ichibon-brosan]

In short, you don't easily charge the watch. You would think with a handy adapter provided, you could plug in the charging pod, and place the watch on it, but there is no LED or anything to indicate charging is taking place, and unless you have some kind of current sensing device, you can only hope it is charging, which leads to some number of two hour periods after which you press the button or touch the screen and hope for a response. That is how I spent my day, and frankly I found it unsatisfying. I am actually getting bored with buying things that don't have clearly written startup instructions. With a hardware cost of $25, it doesn't take long to waste hours of your time, and suddenly you realize the time you have wasted has exceeded the cost of the hardware many times over. I am sorry now I bought this and wasted my time struggling with it. The investment of my money and time would have been more valuable with something well documented that would have left me with experience and skills to use later. I don't recommend fooling around with this.

[lupyuen]

Hi @ichibon-brosan sorry to hear about your issues with PineTime. Perhaps you would like to chat with the PineTime Community about this? We have an active chatroom on Matrix / Discord / Telegram / IRC and we're always glad to help out newbies :-)

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PineTime#Community

[Memiks]

In short, you don't easily charge the watch. You would think with a handy adapter provided, you could plug in the charging pod, and place the watch on it, but there is no LED or anything to indicate charging is taking place, and unless you have some kind of current sensing device, you can only hope it is charging, which leads to some number of two hour periods after which you press the button or touch the screen and hope for a response. That is how I spent my day, and frankly I found it unsatisfying. I am actually getting bored with buying things that don't have clearly written startup instructions. With a hardware cost of $25, it doesn't take long to waste hours of your time, and suddenly you realize the time you have wasted has exceeded the cost of the hardware many times over. I am sorry now I bought this and wasted my time struggling with it. The investment of my money and time would have been more valuable with something well documented that would have left me with experience and skills to use later. I don't recommend fooling around with this.

I think "in experiment" product is not for you... Yes you lost some hours, but to have a "startable" product with PineTime, you need to past lot of time in coding and debugging, or you need to wait the final product...

For the "in charge" part, when you push the PineTime in the deck and rubber it, the screen will light up. so you can see it is charging.
Or you can develop YOUR interface.
So not blame producer for a "fully documented" schema and "no firmware" provided, since it is IN the description...
and the purpose of the product.

I am sorry but your message let me think you need to see in Apple Store and not in Pine64 products...

[danielt]

I am actually getting bored with buying things that don't have clearly written startup instructions.

Today I think PineTime is probably more a community than a product hence the big warning in the store. You are absolutely right that the documentation is currently aimed more or less exclusively at those folks with "extensive embedded OS experience and an interest in Smart Watch development" as mentioned on the store (although I believe you own a JLink so you should find the docs on SWD programming are fairly complete).

I do expect the docs to be reorganised as the software starts to mature to give a much better guide to getting started. Having said that I also think that as the software matures getting started will be intrinsically become much simpler (if we don't need SWD to get started then we don't have to document how to do it).

It would be great if you joined us (the documentation is a wiki and all can edit) but if that's not your thing then consider putting a note in your diary to take another look and three or six months time to see how the landscape has changed.

[ichibon-brosan]

In short, you don't easily charge the watch. You would think with a handy adapter provided, you could plug in the charging pod, and place the watch on it, but there is no LED or anything to indicate charging is taking place, and unless you have some kind of current sensing device, you can only hope it is charging, which leads to some number of two hour periods after which you press the button or touch the screen and hope for a response. That is how I spent my day, and frankly I found it unsatisfying. I am actually getting bored with buying things that don't have clearly written startup instructions. With a hardware cost of $25, it doesn't take long to waste hours of your time, and suddenly you realize the time you have wasted has exceeded the cost of the hardware many times over. I am sorry now I bought this and wasted my time struggling with it. The investment of my money and time would have been more valuable with something well documented that would have left me with experience and skills to use later. I don't recommend fooling around with this.

Well after charging for a day or so I had the following experience. With the rubber band still wrapped around the assembly, I pushed the button and nothing happened. I took the watch off the magnetic charging base and it was still dead. I started to put it back on the base and it lit up, showing the battery as 3/4 full, but when I pulled the watch away from the charging pad again, it was dead. My best assumption at this point is that the battery isn't holding any charge and the connection between the watch, it's back and the charging pad are4 so intermittent that you have to be occasionally lucky just to see a flicker. My hardware may be faulty. This doesn't sound like proper behavior to me.

[danielt]

Agree. That doesn't sound quite right.

Actually I'm a little surprised that the device is not indicating that is charging. It's a long time since I deleted the test firmware that comes with the device but I was pretty sure it showed a charging indicator on the display when the charger was connected (I also remember it taking me a couple of goes to get everything balanced to force it to charge correctly). It is definitely possible that the battery isn't holding charge but I'm rather worried by the absence of charging indicator. Until the back is glued on charging the device is a little tricky since the springs for the motor tend to push the back away and disconnect the charger.

I tend to apply the clamps, bands or weight to the device and then double check the charging indicator to be sure everything has seated correctly before walking away for an hour...

[VMMainFrame]

In short, you don't easily charge the watch. You would think with a handy adapter provided, you could plug in the charging pod, and place the watch on it, but there is no LED or anything to indicate charging is taking place, and unless you have some kind of current sensing device, you can only hope it is charging, which leads to some number of two hour periods after which you press the button or touch the screen and hope for a response. That is how I spent my day, and frankly I found it unsatisfying. I am actually getting bored with buying things that don't have clearly written startup instructions. With a hardware cost of $25, it doesn't take long to waste hours of your time, and suddenly you realize the time you have wasted has exceeded the cost of the hardware many times over. I am sorry now I bought this and wasted my time struggling with it. The investment of my money and time would have been more valuable with something well documented that would have left me with experience and skills to use later. I don't recommend fooling around with this.

Well after charging for a day or so I had the following experience. With the rubber band still wrapped around the assembly, I pushed the button and nothing happened. I took the watch off the magnetic charging base and it was still dead. I started to put it back on the base and it lit up, showing the battery as 3/4 full, but when I pulled the watch away from the charging pad again, it was dead. My best assumption at this point is that the battery isn't holding any charge and the connection between the watch, it's back and the charging pad are4 so intermittent that you have to be occasionally lucky just to see a flicker. My hardware may be faulty. This doesn't sound like proper behavior to me.

The firmware that comes with the watch does have a charging screen.  I saw it multiple times while trying tape, rubber bands, etc. to hold the back on.  Of course if you resort to putting a heavy book on the watch the charging screen is useless.

When running the original firmware the normal status of the watch screen is off.  It will come on if you press the button or through tilt-to-wake.  The screen only stays on for three seconds (unless you are touching the screen).  I could not find any way to change this.  This is probably done to achieve excellent battery life.

Hugh