Coding Time

We have actually all been attracted at once or another by the ultra-cheap electronic devices, generally produced in China, that are available on websites like AliExpress. The costs are commonly so low that the deals seem as well excellent to be real. As YouTuber Poking Innovation lately learnt, occasionally the offers are in fact too excellent to be real. Yet also still, if you agree to place in some work and approve the imperfections, the tools may in fact be worth selecting up anyhow.

Poking Technology bought a smartwatch for about three dollars. The glossy display and glossy layout makes these points look really appealing, particularly thinking about the small cost. However when checked, it was found that in truth the performance was seriously lacking, the battery life was awful, and the interface was a nightmare. Even worse yet, the couple of sensors that were offered seemed to be fake. The action counter added hundreds of actions while resting on a workdesk, and the heart rate/blood pressure sensing unit always seemed to provide concerning the very same measurements.

An appearance inside the case (: Poking Innovation).

You get what you pay for, it appears. Poking Modern technology decided to do a teardown to see specifically what was going on with this smartwatch. It ended up that the supposed heart price sensing unit was just an LED, and the area for the real chip was unpopulated on the PCB. The place for the accelerometer that would certainly power the action counter was likewise uninhabited. About all that was genuine was a Telink TLSR8232 microcontroller, the screen, and a vibration motor.

That is not a lot, however yet offered the form element, it is something one can collaborate with. Poking Technology thought that if this thing ran MicroPython, the horrible user interface can be eliminated, and a customer might program it to do something that is really beneficial. It may not be anything cutting edge, but also for 3 dollars approximately, it would be a swipe.

After experiencing a long and agonizing process of attaching the interior parts of the watch to a personalized breakout board, after that dumping and creating the flash with a custom-made Raspberry Pi Pico-based debug user interface, Poking Technology was a lot of the method there. However to develop new firmware for the onboard Telink microcontroller, an excellent deal of job was still needed.

Successful reprogramming with a Pico (: Poking Modern Technology).

The microcontroller did not have an Arm CPU core, as you would probably expect, however some unusual, proprietary cpu instead. Which meant an advancement toolchain particular to this microcontroller needed to be installed and found out before going any better. After slogging through that work, the work of porting MicroPython became quite very easy. Within an hour an initial version was up and running, however naturally there was even more work to comply with to smooth out some rough sides. When all was stated and done, MicroPython functioned great with the 16 kilobytes of RAM and uncommon design of the Telink chip.

While the watch only set you back a few bucks, the engineering effort was most likely worth thousands, so was it worth it? Well, except Poking Technology, unless you count it as an educational exercise. Yet for those people that can just borrow that job and have a MicroPython watch in no time at all, the 3 dollars is well worth it. Have a look at the full video clip for an in-depth teardown of this junky and fake, yet still awesome in some ways, smartwatch.