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WatchDuino schematics
08/29/2015 at 19:21 • 0 commentsWe've put together some schematics detailing how to connect together all the components of a WatchDuino 2.
After that, if you load the WatchDuino software into the Arduino mini, you should have a functional prototype that you can interact with.
We made this schematic with Fritzing, and we've included the fzz file in the Watchduino repo. You can open it with Fritzing to have a more detailed view of the schematic, and highlight the connections, for easier building. The Fritzing software is open source, and there are packages for all mayor operating systems available to download for free at their website.
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Semifinalists!!
08/24/2015 at 22:03 • 0 commentsThank you, thank you so much!! We are thrilled to know that WatchDuino 2 is semifinalist in the Hackaday prize 2015! We are humbled about getting the recognition of the community amongst so many other amazing projects.
Now is when the real fun starts: we'll need to keep it up if we want to be good enough for the next round. Expect exciting updates ahead!
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Video showcasing the Bluetooth communication
08/16/2015 at 11:40 • 0 commentsJust yesterday we made a video showcasing our latest prototype in action!
The video shows both the watch and the android companion app (the new sexy Cordova redesign) working together. We first pair the application and then trigger some notifications both from the watch (when we enter the weather app for instance), or from the phone (using the testing buttons in the companion app to simulate a notification).
Turn on the subtitles for further explanations of what's going on at each point.
Apologies that the development version is not soldered and assembled into a nice and pretty case!
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WatchDuino now tells you when your bus is coming
08/16/2015 at 11:33 • 0 commentsWe live in London, which is a huge city. Moving around can be a challenge with 11 different underground lines and over 600 bus lines (no joking! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Buses).
Luckily, the TFL (organization managing all things Transport For London) does a wonderful job at having real time data for the status of the transport, and not only that, it also exposes that data though an API. Then other wonderful apps such as Google Maps or Citymapper can make use of it to help you find your way around the city.
When you are waiting on a bus stop in the middle of winter in London you can't help but to wonder when your bus is due. And you want to do without taking your gloves off also! Wouldn't it be great to just know just by looking at your wristwatch?
Now you can, with WatchDuino2! We've built an app that will show a list of the next busses, with times, that will arrive at the bus stop where you are staing. When entering the watch app, WatchDuino will contact your Android phone to request for the bus info. Then the Android app with grab your geoposition and query the TFL API to compute your nearest bus stop and the times of the next buses arriving, and send that info back to the watch.
5 minutes till bus 19? Uhm, might still have time to grab some chips at McDonals! -
Migrated Android companion app to Cordova
08/16/2015 at 11:05 • 0 commentsAs you know, much of the heavy lifting of the WatchDuino apps is actually not done in the watch itself, but on the phone. We made a framework for serializing and handling the bluetooth communications from and to the watch.
For WatchDuino to work, a companion app needs to be running on Android as a service. This companion app contains the messaging framework, plus the bit of logic for every phone app, that usually is in charge of querying some web service and producing a response with data to pass to the watch.
For the sake of debugging and testing, we made a simple interface to the companion app so that we can easily pair the devices, inspect all the messages going through, plus triggering notifications from each of the apps, or simply ping the watch to test the connection.
One of our biggest sources of frustration when developing WatchDuino2 has been working on the Android companion app. Android apps need to be programmed in Java, which is not a great language for rapid prototyping.
So we decided to switch to Apache Cordova (https://cordova.apache.org/) a couple months ago, which is a framework for writing Android apps as if they were web applications, by providing a set of libraries to access the mobile APIs from HTML5 and Javascript.
Being web developers we are much more comfortable with this kind of stack, so we migrated all of the functionality of the companion app to a new one written with Cordova.
Now we are able to make progress faster, with better code, and less bugs. Much win!
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3D printed case
08/16/2015 at 10:39 • 0 commentsOn spring this year (we tweeted about it https://twitter.com/rephus/status/572543084371820544) we got ourselves a Prusa 3D printer, so naturally we wanted to use to to make a neater printed case for WatchDuino!
Our main challenge was actually to find a strap wide enough, that looked good with the design of the watch. For the future we want to experiment with printing with flexible filament, so that we are able to redesign the case, including the strap. -
First prototype
08/15/2015 at 21:51 • 0 commentsOur first prototype from earlier this year was capable of doing bluetooth communication with a companion app on Android to synchronize time, show weather, and latest tweets. Read on in our blog: https://www.coconauts.net/blog/2015/02/26/watchduino2-first-prototype/