The PineTime is a free and open source smartwatch capable of running custom-built open operating systems. Some of the notable features include a heart rate monitor, a week-long battery as well as a capacitive touch IPS display that is legible in direct sunlight. It is a fully community driven side-project, which means that it will ultimately be up to the developers and end-users to determine when they deem the PineTime ready to ship.
https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/
I’ve been very interested in this project since I’ve seen a tweet or forum post or blog post (I don’t remember) saying that we should contact the team from Pine64 if we were interested in developping a FOSS firmware for an open-source and community driven smartwatch project.
As an embedded software designer and open-source enthusiast, I couldn’t resist and directly sent an email to Pine64, saying that I have good ideas for the project, and a bit of experience with some MCU like ESP32, STM32,… To my surprise, they answered me and told me they would send me a devkit to my address!
Since I’ve received it, I spent many hours working on this nice device : creating a dev environment, a base project, device drivers, experimentations, performance improvements, battery life improvements,…
I’ve also spent a lot of time with the community, on the forums, the chat rooms, and even went to FOSDEM in Brussels to meet the team behind Pine64 and some others guys working on the Pinetime
In this page, I’ll try to present you some of my achivements and developpments on the project. I hope you’ll find this interesting and that some of you will join me and contribute to the project !
My goal is to create a firmware for the PineTime in C++ (yes, you can do embedded systems in C++) and based on FreeRTOS.
The project is available on Github : https://github.com/JF002/Pinetime.
