You all know I cannot pass up a bargain. I have added the T-Watch 2020 to my bag of things I will need to make time for. It took me a few times to get it ordered before it went out of stock. The page shows a monochrome screen but it is actually color.
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Have you messed with this much? I donât want to give my daughter a phone yet but was thinking of sending her to school with a Wifi WAP and one of these watches. Considering creating an app so we can message her and she can reply with canned responses.
I have not really played with it much. It yours for the cost of shipping if you want it. I think it would be around $10.00.
Thereâs also the PineTime watch from Pine64. I believe that itâs pretty open for hacking and it has been around long enough that I suspect most of the wrinkles have been ironed out.
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinetime-dev-kit/
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Itâll likely still be a few weeks before I get the 2020 T-Watch from China Iâve been poking around and found a youtube video playlist with lots of hands-on videos about programming these watches.
Iâm looking for doing watch-to-watch communications over the Internet and didnât find any examples but I think I can do this using an online IoT service like IFTTT and Adafruits IoT site.
Adafruit example of IoT I/O looks interesting: Adafruit IO: Send and Receive Data | Adafruit ESP32-S2 Feather | Adafruit Learning System
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I built the My-TTGO-Watch firmware (GitHub - dlarue/My-TTGO-Watch: A GUI named hedge for smartwatch like devices based on ESP32. Currently support for T-Watch2020 (V1,V2,V3), T-Watch2021, M5Paper, M5Core2 and native Linux support for testing. ) loaded it on the watch. Played around, removed some apps I didnât see using and then wore it around today. This particular watch is literally from 2020 so I wasnât surprised when the fully charged watch showed 73% charge. It made it through most of the day but I will be looking for a replacement battery.
I turned WiFi off once I got the clock date/time set and the display goes dim after just a few seconds. But I was having a problem finding it useful turning it on to see the time. Thereâs a button on it but I often donât have my other hand free when I need to see the time. Iâd read it can be woken up with a few quick snaps back and forth of the wrist but it wasnât 100%.
Figuring I would need to code something to make this easier to use I saw someone on campus with a smart watch and asked them how they enabled the display. He said, âlike thisâ and he raised his arm and rotated it so he could see the watch face and it turned on. I thought, how convenient and smart. So I raised my arm and rotated my wrist to see the watch face and it turned on! LOL
Documentation can be a problem with a product like this when there are so many custom watch implementations and many are tuned toward the developer segment.
Of note, I did find one of the apps which are part of the My-TTGO-Watch package is a Power Meter which takes MQTT messages from a MQTT server so I will start looking at that first things since I my target app might just be an MQTT based texting app.
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Too bad I do not have one to play with any more! 
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And I greatly appreciate your willingness to let me play with it. Surprisingly it charged to 100% last evening and I unplugged it over night. I had read reviews which stated that the charging system on these was off and if left on power it would weaken the battery. This morning it was at 60% and I put it on the charger which later went to 112%âŚ
BTW, setting up platformio CLI was very easy, far easier than setting up with vscode.
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The brand new watch arrived from China already but unfortunately there seems to be an assembly issue. The USB connector does not line up well with the hole in the metal case. New watch on top, old(from 2020) on bottom.
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What a bummer!
weâll see how support operates.
A bit of a Narco-Post, but I just noticed this old thread and had to shareâŚ
I also got a TWatch v3 (impulsively) back in 2021. Hardware wise mine has been fine, but the available 'OSâs are just awful. Nothing very satisfactory, some of it very poor indeed, nobody sat down to just make a âwatchâ.
And neither did I. I ended up writing a standalone BT Media player for it. I actually looked at this recently and made some more improvements. And wanted to share⌠I regularly use this on my bedside table (plugged into power) as a simple podcast player. Audio quality is good for speach, lousy elsewhere.
Code lives at:
And Iâve just noticed it doesnt like to stay paired to my new phone, so I might see what is going on there (Iâve got an idea⌠need to put some debug in).
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I ended up giving mine to @dougl so he could keep tabs on his daughter. Not sure what he ended up doing with it.
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Cool and I guess youâve not tried the now âdefaultâ software from here:
Itâs what I used for a few weeks. But I couldnât get even 8 hours of use out of it before the battery would go dead. SInce I got the same from a brand ânewâ one and one from 2020(old battery) I figured it was the hardware used too much power.
Well, fast forward to about 2 weeks ago and I get this email on an old issue I opened on the T-Watch and so I asked about a replacement battery and was pointed to an out-of-stock link but it was an LQ-S1 battery which worked in other smart watches and now I get 2 days of use out of it so NOW it is something I will try to hack into a school canned message texting device as I had originally intended.
BTW, mine are 2020 V1 models. Also, the guy who pointed me to the battery and said his gets 48hours also pointed me to his repo where he has micropython doing his phone app and video player. GitHub - VynDragon/WPOS2: Version 2 of WPOS for T-Watch, very threading, much preemptive
Another thing, when I powered my T-Watch up last week for the first time in many months, I was notified of a firmware update. I donât know what it was for but suspect it was for the esp32 itself which might help with your connection issues.
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just to document this, they support engineers said this was normal and I should still be able to plug in a USB cable. Regardless, I didnât like it so I disassembled the watch and found a bad alignment at the lowest level(closest to the glass) and after adjusting the USB port lines up better.
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Ooh,ThankYou!
That is very promising; Iâd already thought that this would make a good MicroPython device since that has excellent ESP32 support, and a lot more psram than most devices.
I couldnât get on with the Sharango or any âofficialâ firmware, too gimmicky (bitcoin trackers and swimsuit watchfaces⌠count me outâŚ)
The official âSimpleWatchâ example from the library is probably the best of the bunch⌠but still pretty frustrating.
Anyway; I just sat down with my code and fixed my connection issues
(note, I was already using the latest ESP and TTGO code plus libs, the note on using old verssions in my README was just something I forgot to remove; the btAudio library maintainer actually accepted my PR for it last year.)
What I have now done is extend the btAudio library to add a forget() call that will erase the remembered connection. The issue was that once the watch had been connected to my old phone it remembered the BT address too well, and would not allow any other device to connect.
I had to turn on the ESP logging to diagnose and view that, the fix is now in my fork and application. I intend to do a new PR on the original library.
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Trimming the default watch app just got lots easier.
AutoCall feature was added to the T-Watch default software which allows apps to be deleted from the build by simply deleting the directory in the source tree and likewise adding apps by adding them to the source tree.
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