Hello,
I do not like pressing a button to see the time.
Can I keep an analog black/white clock always on?


Thanks in advance for reply,

Mario

You definitely can. You'll need to tweak the code a bit, and it will hit your battery life. But that is what hacking is for, you'll figure it out. I'd suggest posting your code so we can comment on it once you get started, if you have any other questions.

Ok I explain myself better. If I do that thing will it stay powered on without recharge for at least one day?

Thanks again.

Mario

At the moment, if you display a small digital clock always-on, the watch will stay on for a full day.

Nice to hear, I hope it will be the same for an analog clock (like the one in your sample code).
It should work like a "screensaver". It possible to do with the development kit? If true I will try it on the simulator and then I will buy the watch (I live in Italy). I would appreciate if you put on your web site more photos and also the size of the watch.

Thanks again,
Mario

I tried running a small digital clock and the watch was dead in less than four hours...

No bluetooth connections, no intensive CPU use, just a small digital output that was updated once per minute.

My understandding with the OLED is that the amount of power used is proportionate to the number of pixels in use? I had just a time & date display using the default 'printf' output, whatever font size that is.

HH:MM
YYYY-MM-DD

Yes, we're definitely going to be working on creating the right API calls and a tutorial to extend battery life as long as possible. It turns out it actually depends on the number of vertical columns used, then there is some internal OLED controller stuff that will shut off unused columns completely. We'll be exposing these functions to enable 20-24 hour always-on functionality soon. Keep pinging us on this thread to make us work faster!

Thanks Eric, that would be fantastic.

I hope you don't mind if I keep asking for access to the battery status as well? If we could get either a percentage of charge remaining or even a direct read of mA then we could have our apps display that to the user and/or take appropriate action when sensing the power is at a 'critical' or 'warning' level.

Cheers!

Turns out battery monitoring is a pretty tough nut to crack. We have some preliminary routines built, but they work by monitoring how long the watch has been on for, then estimating remaining life. The issue is variability: depending on if you have the screen and/or BT connected changes the battery life game quite a bit.

If anyone has any suggestions, totally keen to hear them!

Ah - I had assumed you had something in place already to estimate battery status, based on this image on the Blackberry page:


When I saw the half-full battery icon in the first image, I was thinking aha, if only we could get access to wherever that data comes from!

That aside, if getting a capacity percentage is a challenge, I'd be just as happy to have an mAh reading, or mV reading. At least with some raw information of what the battery is doing right now we could guesstimate either how much time it had left, or through some empirical testing, figure out at what point we are in a 'power critical' or 'power warning' state.

There would have to some type of voltage detection circuit in the watch to do this. If there is a detetion circuit built into the Arm7 processor, this shouldn't be aproblem, as the battery should have a set mAh or Voltage, so that could be hard programmed, and then just compare the current reading with the default reading.