Since the last log I’ve been using this watch more and more as my daily smartwatch, in that time I’ve come across a few issues which are now resolved. A lot of these changes are minor but both the smartwatch’s firmware and the android app have undergone some changes.

Android App Changes

After the previous log I kept a close eye on the android app to make sure that everything was working properly. Android 10 tends to kill processes happening in the background when they’re not being actively used by the user. To combat this, I had to move the BLE GATT server to its own service. With this change it seems that while the android app itself may be inactive the service will continue to run without issue. The notification data is also no longer stored in the UI, this would cause some issues when the app would go to sleep, resulting in the same old notification data being sent multiple times without getting updated. The log shown on the app UI underwent similar changes, having a proper log of when exactly BLE data has been sent makes it much easier to determine when the app isn’t working properly.

There was also an issue with reading specific notifications, specifically Gmail would almost never display properly on the android app. The app can now read the body text of a received email which in turn means the body text can be read from the smart watch.

Smartwatch Firmware Changes

There’s been a lot of minor bug-fixes since the last log including a lot of fixes for random crashes. There is also now a “force put to sleep” option on the smartwatch, tapping the screen 50 times with each tap within 200ms of each other will force the watch into deep sleep. BLE notification receiving is now also an interruptible process, since notifications are generally obtained when the screen is off this prevents the watch from ignoring the wakeup tap on the screen.

One major change made to the smartwatch firmware has to do with timekeeping. This project uses the ESP32’s onboard RTC to keep time, without an external crystal this time would drift by as much as 15 minutes per day. The only way previously to update the time was to use Wi-Fi to obtain the current time, however this was a clunky solution since it had to be done manually and requires a known WIFI connection to be close. To fix time keeping the ESP32 now parses its time directly from the notification string sent from the companion app. Currently the watch updates its notification data every 60 seconds, this makes the RTC drift essentially a non-issue in most cases.

That’s pretty much everything that’s changed since the last log. The core functionality of the watch is finished, all that’s left is adding additional apps and making the watch a bit “smarter”. I’m also looking back into the hardware for potential improvements before I do a final pass on the board layout to try and make the watch thinner, but that’s all in the future. See you in the next log!