Is there an ETA to have the battery state be exposed via the SDK? I was thinking two things:

- Display a power indicator in the upper right (ala Notification app). I know others have pointed this out
- If the power gets below, say 10%, put the watch into power save. This would turn off bluetooth, not run any other app code, and only show the time/date for 1 second when the button is pressed, then go to sleep.

There are a lot of apps out there that you can load up on your watch, and they never go to sleep and just eat your power. Maybe something like this would be cool to be part of the firmware (configurable % maybe). Just have a printf of the time/date. <shrug>

The only battery state info obtainable in the SDK is whether it is charging or not. Measuring battery life is a complex problem and we do not have a concrete solution for this yet. Consequently there is not ETA for exposing battery life functions in the SDK.

@Ryan. That makes sense. I would be a fan of the underlying firmware cutting cycles from the app if the battery get low (e.g.; 10%) for the purposes of preserving the clock. Maybe that is more doable? I.e. calculate you are about to run out of battery, rather than an accurate computation of what the exact percentage is.

Thanks,

Maybe another alternative could be some stats on how long that watch has been up. Seems like that would give users a decent idea of how much battery they had left.

-Matt

I don't know it it's also true for this watch, but in our company's devices the issue is that the very act of reading the battery voltage by definition drains the battery a little bit. You can't measure voltage without using a little current. At one point there was a product requirement in one product that the battery voltage display be realtime - however, that ended up effectively draining the battery very quickly, so that requirement was eliminated.

The other issue is that the particular battery technology matters - in some batterie,s the voltage drops steadily, while in some, the voltage stays close to the rated voltage, then drops relatively quickly. That makes it tough to actually know how long you have.

One dirty little in the consumer electronics industry is that most battery voltage indicators are widely inaccurate and often the scales are fudged to give the impression of longer battery life. Same goes for WiFi signal strength indicators.

@mtuzzolo that's what we do in the main notifications app (-n). I've added a ticket to expose this in SDK if people want.