dude this thing has a flashlight? you son of a bitch, I'm in
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Should I Buy One?
That's up to you, champ. I'm not your real dad and I'm not trying to take his place. But I'm here for you if you need me.
Love it. 🤣🤣🤣
Get a BangleJS2 and you won't need to charge it on a bus.
2 weeks between charges. GadgetBridge is the mobile app. It's more expensive, true: £76. The battery is replaceable, though, so you might have to buy fewer.
I just looked that up, that is insane. As described "Spartan" but really cool
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It's more expensive, true: £76.
Not if you order 50 or more!
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On a side note I wish hybrid smartwatches were still a thing. Most of the product lines are discontinued, but I liked the idea of it.
I really really like my Garmin Instinct 2. It a kind of hybrid but between old digital clock and smartwatch, instead of analog.
It has strong Casio Pro Trek vibes. One color, no touch LCD screen. Solar charging, more than 3 weeks battery life, GPS, all health sensors and smart stuff.
Garmin makes excellent watches
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I feel like withings cornered the market on hybrids. They are a little pricey but they are built very well.
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Loved the article.
One pet peeve of mine: PD plugs are too powerful to charge puny devices. Not the first time I've run into this problem.
So sad that we've finally gotten a good standard (USB c) but there are still things that look like they should fit together and work, but don't.
The thing is that USB type C is only about the physical plug/socket, and the USB standard and version that uses it is a separate thing.
In this case it's probably a PD only charger and the device only supports plain old 5v 500mA USB power
too powerful? what do you mean? USB PD by default supplies 5v the same as USB A and increments from there
5v is pretty low - 3v is pretty common logic voltage, but i doubt anyone would use voltage that low for battery charging?
do you mean you don’t like to “waste” a perfectly good powerful USB C port? you can get some pretty low watt USB C plugs, but honestly i much prefer to just have a brick with 7 big ports
The person you replied to is referencing findings made by the author, in the article.
The author tried plugging a PD charger into the watch to charge it, and it wouldn't work. It's probably not PD as a specification couldn't work, but that the watch failed to negotiate with the charger.
Whatever the reason, the findings were that plugging your PD laptop charger into this cheap little watch does not result in any charging.
right… i think that’s less of a problem with PD chargers and more of a problem with non-compliant A chargers (and the device itself being non-compliant): wattage/amperage at these has nothing to do with the protocol (other than auto shutoff under a given current draw, but that’s not instantaneous)
i believe that the USB spec says there needs to be a resistor bridging one of the pins to receive power? i can see USB-A chargers just dumping 5v through the cable no matter what and USB-PD more reliably implementing the spec because it’s more complex, so less reason to cut corners
The device is probably just using a USB-C format connector to get power, without using the data connection at all, and a strict implementation of the USB protocol on the other side (the so called Host) would mean the device gets from the host only the minimal power levels (100mA @ 5V, if I remember it correctly) meant to merelly power enough a connected device which has no batteries (say, a mouse) for it to actually do the initial USB connection negotiation, and that current will only get increased by the host it if during that negotiation the device tells the host it requires high-current (which in different USB versions has a different value - in USB 1.0 it was 500mA but latter versions increase it), a negotiation which that device can't do because it doesn't actually do USB data at all and just treats the whole thing as a dumb power cable.
Dumb charger bricks don't care at all because they themselves only do power and not the USB protocols, so really just treat the USB cable as a power cable into which they always make available whatever current the other side pulls up to the brick's max supply capacity (usually 1A or 2A) with no "USB negotiation".
This is why even in the times of USB-A some devices would charge fine from a dumb USB power brick but charge really slow if connected to a host which is a data device that can also do charging (like, for example, a notebook).
This is even without getting USB PD into the mix.
Because USB PD is a comms and power protocol, were the device tells the host the characteristics of the power it expects to get (not only current but even voltage) the USB PD brick has a proper USB implementation were it acts as a USB host.
I expect the USB PD brick has a strict implementation of the USB protocol which, in the absence of USB negotiation, just provides that minimum current that per the protocol a USB host is expected to provide pre-negotiation, which is too low for properly charging most things.
And the author wrongly said
PD will not negotiate down to 1W power levels
The correct way ro ask for 0.8 W (5 V, 0.16 A) is to request 5 volts, any current. Doesn't matter if the charger is capable of 500 mA (legacy USB), 1 A or 3.1 A. The PD standard can accomodate the watch, it's just that the watch lacks active electronics that are required to talk to the charger (and even the supplied C-C cable is non-compliant by being power-only).
Edit: apparently PD allows 0.1A steps between 0.1 A and 3 A for 5 volts so it's technically possible for a PD charger to deny power to the watch if it's VERY underpowered and can't even put out 1 W. Still, it's the watch's fault for lacking correct PD implementation.
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I had no idea USB C charging was such a rarity for smart watches
Heh, of course it has a knock-off UI too.
Please check in with an update after 6 months.
I’d buy a smart watch if it displayed my “Heart” stat out of 100.
Also, 16 quid is “a couple of pints” now?!
In London, yeah probably.
In a wetherspoons in the north east? You could get 8 pints for that, if you're down for some cask ales.
I'm curious about the reliability of this port on a sweaty wrist exposed to dust and general labor environments. My phones, even back to the proprietary plug days, have had the charge port covered and my wrist watch would get wrecked.
It has a small rubber lug - which has worked so far at keeping out the grime. But I don't have a manual labour job.
This article was right up my alley. I've been considering buying a cheapo smartwatch. I suppose this one couldn't be used as a mp3 player for jogging though.
It doesn't have storage or a headphone port. But it will stream music over Bluetooth. So if you want to annoy everyone you job with, you can listen to its tinny speaker :-)
Is it esp32 based?
No, its something different, according to the blog:
First up, the brains of the watch is the JL7012 - which is a deliberately underpowered chip.
A phone for the price of a couple of pints? £16? Two pints? Very London of him to assume that’s the price of a couple of pints. Actually unreadable.
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I really like the Interactive Relationship Graph on your site. Reminds me of when I used to work with graph databases and could visualize all the information in the database as a handy graph of nodes and relationships.
Thank you 😄
I wrote about it at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/graphing-the-connections-between-my-blog-posts/