I’m not quite ready to put aside £300+ for an Apple Watch. I’m not yet convinced that a smart watch has a place in my life. That’s why I jumped on the Pebble bandwagon with their recent Kickstarter campaign for the Pebble Time. £100 seemed like an achievable amount of money to see if a smart watch was for me.
Fastforward to a few days ago and my Pebble Time arrived in the post. It looks a little nicer in person than it appears in the marketing material. I’m still getting used to it and don’t yet know if its for me but I have taken the SDK for a spin :)
The SDK is fairly straightforward. Installation is taken care of by Homebrew (at least on Mac). I’m using Sublime Text for writing the code (wriiten in C). Usefull command-line commands are:-
pebble build – to build the binary
pebble install – to test the binary on the default emulator (Basalt)
pebble screenshot – to take a screenshot through the emulator
(Adding the –phone switch to these and specifying the IP performs the commands via the physical watch rather than the emulator).
Its fairly simple stuff, fathomable within an afternoon or so.
What I’ve ended up creating is a new Watch Face for the Pebble. My goal was, first and foremost, to create something that looks good.
Equaliser works like this:
– Rows are hours. They fill up from the bottom to the top. Each full row is an hour past midnight. So two full bars is 2am.
– Columns are minutes. These fill up from left to right. Once 60 columns are filled, an hour is complete, and a new row starts.
– Seconds are represented by the vertical line that sweeps across the display.
Whilst the Watch Face is intended as something fun, I have worked on readbility with the following:
– The black vertical bars are 15 minute increments. The thicker black vertical bar is half past the hour.
– The midday row is highlighted orange.
– Orange graduations are visible on the left every two hours.
Equaliser also has the following:
– Support for both 12 and 24 hour time formats
– The ability to suppress the second hand
– Date (day name, day number, month name)
– Battery percentage
– Bluetooth connection indicator (with vibrate on disconnect/connect)
– Support for the original Pebble
I’ve also made the source code available here.