Since Dick Tracy all the way back in ’46, smart watches have captured the public imagination. After several false starts, the technology has gone through a renaissance in the last 10 years or so. For the average consumer, there’s been a proliferation of hardware in the marketplace, with scores of different models to choose from. For the hackers, however, pickings are a little more slim. So what is the best smart watch for the tinkerers among us?
A New Offering
These fears were allayed somewhat after a photo of an actual prototype was revealed.
Recently, Pine64 announced development of their PineTime smartwatch. Eagle-eyed spectators quickly identified that early photos seemed to be of an existing product from AliExpress, though Pine64 have said that their device simply takes advantage of an existing chassis and body to cut down on production costs.
Internally, the device is reported to feature either an nRF52832 or nRF52840 system-on-chip, containing a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU core. This should provide plenty of grunt, and there’s Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy for connectivity purposes. Display resolution is 240×240, likely using an OLED screen.
It’s being touted as an open source project, capable of running various real-time operating systems. There’s been talk of implementing everything from FreeRTOS to Mbed, with the development community likely to shape the future of the platform.
Using a Photoshopped image of an AliExpress watch raised eyebrows on Twitter.
There’s a lot of optimism here and of course it’s hard to say if they can deliver on the features or stick to a suspiciously low price of $25 USD being floated this early in t ..
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