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Hacking the Timex m851

313 pointsby tavisoover 1 year ago

17 comments

nxobjectover 1 year ago
Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) is: when running at a low-power mode at 32kHz, it consumes an astoundingly low 9 <i>micro</i>amps. [1] How much do you think you could get done with a cycle budget of 32k per second?<p>That, and alongside 48K ROM and 2K RAM, you get 3 timers, a UART, and an A&#x2F;D converter. [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.epson.com&#x2F;products_and_drivers&#x2F;semicon&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;id002478.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.epson.com&#x2F;products_and_drivers&#x2F;semicon&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;id...</a>
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jstanleyover 1 year ago
Very cool.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in something with a bit more features, check out the Bangle.js[0]. The benefits are you have Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, vibrator, and a colour screen. The main downside is that the battery lasts considerably less than 3 years.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;banglejs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;banglejs.com&#x2F;</a>
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WithinReasonover 1 year ago
I had this watch about 15 years ago. Among other things I could track:<p>0. Where my next class is going to be<p>1. Store the bus schedule to the bus stops I used<p>2. The phase of the moon<p>Checking the bus schedule on your watch before smartphones looked like a James Bond move :)<p>I wish they still made watches like this, at this power consumption you could keep your watch charged from solar power indefinitely
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sandreasover 1 year ago
Well, maybe a more modern approach to a hackable watch is<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sharandac&#x2F;My-TTGO-Watch">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sharandac&#x2F;My-TTGO-Watch</a><p>I stumbled over this, while I was researching for building my own DIY iPod Nano 7G with the LILYGO T5 E-Paper dev board<p>Product: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005002474854718.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005002474854718.html</a><p>Code-Repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Xinyuan-LilyGO&#x2F;LilyGo-T5-Epaper-Series">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Xinyuan-LilyGO&#x2F;LilyGo-T5-Epaper-Series</a><p>This would be an amazing iPod Nano 7G replacement, if I had more time and more skill in arduino stuff ;)
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GaggiXover 1 year ago
&gt;a single battery can last 3 years! This is a big selling point for me, I don’t think they’re making consumer watches like this any more.<p>Well Casio surely does. Search &quot;Casio MIP display&quot;.
brudgersover 1 year ago
More on the Timex Datalink series<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timex_Datalink" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timex_Datalink</a>
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FirmwareBurnerover 1 year ago
I really wish more watches&#x2F;wearables would be made with these 8-bit low-power chips and have exposed data pins to make them hackable. 3 years battery life is where it&#x27;s at for a watch. If I have to think about charging my watch is a no-go for me.
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omershapiraover 1 year ago
This is a reminder that we can, in fact, have Nice Things – if there only were a market for Nice Things.<p>I&#x27;d love to have a decently integrated watch with low battery usage (and generally low stakes for wearing&#x2F;replacing) which I can also agree with aesthetically. Bums me out that Sensorwatch [1] is the best we can do.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sensorwatch.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sensorwatch.net</a><p>edit: Sensorwatch is amazing, but not an ecosystem (yet).
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psychphysicover 1 year ago
This does seem nice and even simpler than TI&#x27;s Ez430-chronos [0].<p>That said, 3 years on a single battery doesn&#x27;t seem great of course I suppose it depends what apps you use and load..and that it&#x27;s programmable that is cool.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparkfun.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;retired&#x2F;10019" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparkfun.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;retired&#x2F;10019</a>
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TapamNover 1 year ago
I got one of these for my birthday in 2003, and I&#x27;m still using it. The Data Link USB &quot;only&quot; has a battery life of about a year. The 3-year life Data Link would be the older model, that optically received data from a PC by watching light pulses from a CRT.<p>I don&#x27;t know why he&#x27;s complaining about the Windows 98&#x2F;XP PIM software. It worked fine, and it&#x27;s open source &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;p&#x2F;datalinkusb&#x2F;code&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;tree&#x2F;USBPIM&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;p&#x2F;datalinkusb&#x2F;code&#x2F;HEAD&#x2F;tree&#x2F;USBPIM&#x2F;</a>&gt;. It does not work on Windows 10 and later, however. I looked into it years ago, and it seemed related to the GUI code (I think it used MFC?) and not anything involving watch access. Probably fairly easy for someone familiar with Windows dev to fix, especially with the source. Edit: Wait, I misread. He was complaining about the SDK wizard, not the PIM. Yeah, the wizard wasn&#x27;t great. Also, it was slow since every file assembled had several megabytes of headers included.<p>Having C code running on the watch is nuts. The builtin ROM software was written in a high-level assembler (probably for size&#x2F;CPU&#x2F;power consumption reasons), and the user SDK was a regular assembler (I got the impression that back then Epson wasn&#x27;t giving away the better development software, so the best that could be included for free with the SDK was the regular assembler.) The OS&#x27;s overlay system and semi-adhoc calling convention isn&#x27;t C friendly. Often, values were passed in whatever registers were convenient for the callee, with macros to help hide this when possible. EEPROM access functions took parameters from global RAM variables.<p>The SDK documentation was great. 10&#x2F;10. You could not reasonably ask for more. It had many examples, every single header file used by Timex, which documented every single function and variable (even ones internal to the builtin software), and PDFs describing every bit of data going in and out of the watch, from the communication protocol to the file formats used by every builtin app. The OS used by the watch is impressively clean and easy to use for a one-off 8-bit system.<p>Most development for the watch was shared on a Yahoo Group, which is down now, but there are backups somewhere. I manually saved a bunch, and I know that people there backed up the messages and uploaded them to... I don&#x27;t remember exactly where, I&#x27;d have to look it up. I remember running across a post there from the EEVBlog guy when looking through old posts. He was asking about making a fitness tracking app.<p>It took me a long time to get around to writing anything for it, but I wrote several programs for it around 2013-2015ish. A timer, calender, expense tracker, and a viewer for the user tracking data (stuff like how many times you&#x27;ve pressed a button, entered an app, or had an alarm go off). The SDK had a single DOS program as part of the build process (it was something to feed the linker some addresses), so I had to rewrite a 32-bit version to get the SDK to work on 64-bit Windows 7. I think I later found someone else already did that on the Yahoo Group.
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djmipsover 1 year ago
There&#x27;s a new model that looks the same? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timecentershop.gr&#x2F;ents&#x2F;timext53722.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timecentershop.gr&#x2F;ents&#x2F;timext53722.html</a>
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puzzlingcaptchaover 1 year ago
I am most impressed by the documentation provided in the references. Looks like it was ahead of its time.
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CliffStollover 1 year ago
Has anyone informed the original programmer, Nino Sarmiento?
ck2over 1 year ago
Does the Timex m878 have the same core cpu?<p>Because the m878 has GPS and ANT+ support which makes it exponentially more powerful.
hnwizardover 1 year ago
oh well
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aziwa475over 1 year ago
Cool. Any idea where to buy these? Thanks
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jeroen79over 1 year ago
Cool, but its not really hacking if you just use an sdk to write code for a platform.
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