Metawatch

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Metawatch is a programmable wristwatch with a 96x96 pixel display

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MSP-WDS430BT2000D  - Bluetooth Wearable Watch development system with Digital display  The display itself is actually interesting...  It's basically a mirror with LCD film on top of it so the pixels are either a reflecting mirror or diffuse white.  I think this makes it easy to see in most lighting.  There are some dim lighting situations that don't work so well, but in those cases a little white LED at the top of the display (activated by a button) that lets you make out much of the screen.

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Besides the graphical display, the thing I like about this watch is that it can go ~5 days on a charge, even with Bluetooth on all the time.  I'm hoping it can last a week with Bluetooth turned off most of the time.  I've got enough work keeping my phone charged and just don't want to deal with charging my watch all the time.

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There is an "analog" version too, but I haven't figured out why anybody would want it.  I thought it might have longer battery life, but it turns out the battery life is actually less.

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I ordered my directly from Ti.com for a rather high price of $199.  It actually said "out of stock" when I placed the order, but hear via email to info@metawatch.org that they get new ones ever week.  Sure enough, it was delivered in just a couple days.

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Programming:

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There are two kinds of programming you can do,  "firmware development" and "remote application development".

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Remote Application Development

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The idea here is to interact with the standard firmware by sending screen updates over bluetooth. 

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At present, there only seems to be an Android OS example from Metawatch.org.  So, I've written a little test program in MS Visual Studio C++ (MFC) to work towards something that we can run on a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone.  Maybe one day we'll have something for Windows Phone 8.

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Windows MFC Test Program:  Metawatch1 - Set the time on your watch via Bluetooth

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This little test program prepares and sends a packet to set the watch time.  This shows how to set up a packet with CRC, open a serial port, and send the data.
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With either a Bluetooth USB dongle (PC) or built in Bluetooth (laptop), the SPP interface appears to the code as  a regular serial port.  So, the code talks to it that way.  Windows may ask for a pairing code, if so just enter "0000".
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Screenshot: 
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Download the Visual Studio 2010 C++ (MFC) Project here.  (Source Code)
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Download the Windows executable file here
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I think once I install the WM6.5 SDK, I can get this working on my phone in short order.
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More testing:

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Here's a hand drawn calendar on the idle display:

  

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Firmware Development

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This is what I'd really like to do, but it presents a large number of challenges.  First, it requires a very expensive IDE.  Well, OK, that's the main problem.

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There is a free 30-day trial for the IDE, maybe I'll try that when I think I have an idea of what to do...
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Reading on the Metawatch forum there may be an open source, free path, but that may take some time. 

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Forum

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The user forum is just getting going.  The forum software seems to have a bunch of issues.  Hopefully, these will get resolved soon:

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If you keep getting logged out when you want to reply to a post, you're not alone!

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As a fix, go to your browser address bar and where it says "http://metawatch.org..." add www to make "http://www.metawatch.org..."
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You currently can't edit posts or post attachments.

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In IE8, the pages look all corrupted and it's hard to read the text.