PineTime - a $27 smartwatch that runs open source firmware and software that's easy to flash and easy to modify and tinker with
3 years ago by Edgerunner Alexis to c/cyberpunk
This is the smartwatch I own. True netrunners know that the tech we wear on (or under) our skin is a prime entry vector for ever hungry megacorps to bleed the pulsing data from our digital veins, so having a wearable I have full control over is of paramount importance. I can flash it with new firmware whenever I want, the multiple open source options available are all an open book to any hacker worth their cyberlinguistic salt, and I can know for a fact that it won't phone home with my location or other data to any corporation behind the scenes. If we are all going to be cyborgs integrating technology onto and eventually into our bodies, better to control that tech ourselves!
Agreed, that'd be nova
"Nova" means "awesome" or "amazing" kinda
I agree. I'm less interested in "smartwatch" and more interested in "fitness tracker". PineTime is missing several sensors that competitors like Apple Watch and Fitbit devices have, such as electrical sensors, GPS, and temperature sensors which can be used for more advanced fitness tracking.
Yeah the Apple Watch was kinda the final straw that got me to switch over from Android. The amount of effort required to root a phone hard enough to where apps couldn't stalk me wasn't helping.
Apple's made privacy a fairly large part of their value offering recently. The main issue remains integrating with other local services.
Apple's made privacy a fairly large part of their value offering recently.
The problem is that that's mostly marketing smoke and mirrors. They define privacy as not giving your data to third parties (who aren't subcontracted with them), not actually refusing to collect in-depth data or link it to your personal identity. There have been a number of pieces of evidence released recently that show that they actually collect as much if not more data about you then Google does, and tend to ignore your privacy settings.
The amount of effort required to root a phone hard enough to where apps couldn't stalk me wasn't helping.
Depending on your phone, you could use GrapheneOS (which is super easy to set up compared to rooting and basically the best security and privacy you can get in any smartphone) or CalyxOS. Both easier (and more effective) than rooting, and certainly better than Apple.
Re: Apple + privacy
I believe most of their intentions about restricting 3rd parties from seeing your data is keeping it for themselves. IIRC Apple plans to (if they haven't already, I'm on the Android platform) release their own ad service using their own proprietary data.
It's basically just Android sans (or with sandboxed) Google, I really don't miss anything. It's honestly a pleasure to live with.
Graphene user here. I rooted my devices and flashed cousin ROMs for years, but stopped because I got tired of the compromises. A couple of months ago I took the plunge while upgrading and got a pixel 7a (so it's got the longest support) to put Graphene on. I have found it to be, basically, Android. Googless at first, but you can add Goog to taste. Play Services runs sandboxed, if you want to run it.
Most apps work just fine, but in my setup Google Wallet does not. I can't remember exactly why but I think it's related to Play Services. Banking and "pay me" apps like Venmo seen to work fine though!
When your device is locked with a passcode, Touch ID, or Face ID, all of your health and fitness data in the Health app — other than your Medical ID — is encrypted and inaccessible by default. Additionally, if you are using iOS 12 or later and turn on two-factor authentication, Apple will not be able to read your health and activity data synced to iCloud.
Most of iPhones' data at this point is e2e encrypted. (Medical ID is the info for first responders thing, which has to be accessed while the phone is locked.)
I think you’re (intentionally or otherwise) mistaken about Apple and privacy. E2E encryption and key data being stored only on device, it’s the best privacy story around. They don’t make money by selling you or your data - they make money selling hardware to you.
You should watch this video about how much invasive user data MacOS collects and sends (in plaintext) to Apple's servers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMc5zgALLiY
And this one, about App Store tracking and them ignoring privacy settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=016QGxOsjQY
And read this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/...
E2E encryption and key data being stored only on device
That's for iMessage. And you can get identical functionality from Signal on any Android phone with a secure element (like a Pixel). They don't encrypt iCloud backups, and regularly turn that info in to the government. And, ironically, those iCloud backups include messages, which aren't stored on their servers encrypted! According to the NYT: "Apple also has access to text messages that it says are otherwise encrypted when they are backed up in iCloud, a workaround that’s apparently necessary to aid law enforcement."
it’s the best privacy story around
Not remotely. That would be GrapheneOS on a Pixel or CalyxOS on another Android phone. Apple is good in comparison to other stock vendors, sure. But it isn't the best option. Also, maybe read their privacy policy sometime: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww. It's enlightening stuff. They collect a lot, and use it for whatever they want as long as it doesn't leave Apple (or the businesses its partnered with).
They don’t make money by selling you or your data - they make money selling hardware to you.
Maybe not: "Apple is also building out its own online advertising business, portions of which a French privacy watchdog said may run afoul of European laws. The agency said that Apple doesn’t appear to require users’ consent for tracking, as it now does from other app makers, meaning it could benefit from the targeted advertising that its do-not-track feature is meant to hinder." (From the NYT article)
After all, why would a megacorporation turn down the opportunity to milk more profit out of their very captive (have you ever tried to get an Apple person to leave their walled garden?) income source? Remember, this is /c/cyberpunk lol
Basically, Apple says all sorts of nice things about privacy, but its all entirely bullshit.
They don’t make money by selling you or your data
Correct. They make money holding it hostage.
The good news is that Pine is also creating the #PineNote with an eink display, so maybe the creation of an eink #PineTime at some point in the distant future is not completely unrealistic either. Assuming the display is the main thing you miss about it, of course. :)
E-ink and physical buttons are what I'm waiting for
Pebbles absolutely did not use an e-ink display, if it did anything with motion would be unusable. The Pebble used a transflective memory LCD made by Sharp, which is why the watches have a refresh rate greater than like 2 hz, and allowed it to still get good battery life with an LCD.
I'm in the same boat. Saw this watch a while ago, and was like "it's not the pebble time or pebble round".
I started rocking a Pebble Time about a year ago with my Android phone and I absolutely love it! If you can find one with decent battery life and get Rebble set up on it, it'll still serve you well (in my experience, at least).
Oh, I still have a working Time, Time Steel, and P2. I just needed more/better health tracking and nfc payments. The unreleased Pebble Time 2 would've been perfection. I've been a Rebbler since day 1 :)
I love my PineTime. I don't care about health stats (I'm well aware of how much time I spend sitting at my computer), but I wanted a watch that did the following things:
- tell me the time
- show text message notifications
- control my music
This watch does all that and... basically nothing else. It has a step-counter but I don't trust it. It has a heart rate monitor but it can never detect my heart rate (I probably wear my watch too loosely). So for my needs, it does everything I want and nothing I don't want. It definitely isn't the right watch for someone who cares about tracking health info, but for reducing the number of times I pull out my phone for stupid reasons, this is perfect. It can even reject phone calls so I don't have to pull my phone out of my pocket when I get yet another spam call.
How long is the battery Life?
About 6-7 days. I haven't noticed myself consistently charging my watch on the same day (like, if I was charging every Sunday or something), but I just checked GadgetBridge (the companion app for Android) and it has a chart showing my battery go from 96% down to 12% over a 6-day period, when I then plugged in my watch to charge it again. The battery icon changes color when it hits 15% so I usually plug it in at that point rather than letting it drain completely.
I gotta say, the step counter is accurate. I've tallied steps on longer walks and it was only off by 0.5-1%
Home Assistant is great. Fairly friendly to set up (not a easy as Google and such) an HD will integrate with tonnes of brands
There's Mycroft ( @mycroft_ai ), which carries most of the potential in open source home assistants, but seems to struggle to take of.
Personally I'm an open source enthusiast and the last thing I'd want is this type of technology installed in my house, open source or not. I suspect people like me are the reason this project struggles to gain more traction...
Yeah, it's gonna be a long time before I let any smart devices with cameras or microphones in my house (besides my phone, lol). And why I have two different networks - one for my IOT devices, and for my personal network of devices. Although in this era, it's safe to simply assume someone is always watching if there's a camera or microphone nearby.
I've also got a pinetime watch, never been a fan of the data collection smartwatch companies do, its great to have something that I know exactly how it works with its open source firmware. It's not exactly perfect but there's been tons of updates from contributions by the community, I've even been able to make some modifications of my own too.
If anyone here in the comments has any questions about it I'd be happy to answer them
How's the battery life? My favourite thing about the Pebble was that it lasted a full week between charges, which I always attributed to the e-paper screen.
I run a patched version of the Infinitime firmware that has some tweaks to optimise battery life, these will likely be in the main release soon enough. I did a test after installing the firmware and got 10 days battery life from 100% to dead of daily normal watch use. This is with a somewhat new (~2 months old) watch so don't know how it may degrade but getting over a week is easily achievable on the pinetime.
This makes me sad because it's not available in my country "for logistical reasons", and it seems to be just what I wanted
Me too. Pine64 devices, especially the phone are the things I always wanted for a long time :(
It's € 62,65 over here, fuck that.
If I go to order, it says
29.99 USD watch
11.99 USD shipping
38.98 USD = € 35.56
(Czechia)
The article didn't mention an EU store and I just went for the first Google result 🤷♂️
For some reason Pine's EU store is ridiculously overpriced. The pinecil is around £55 if you buy it from the EU store or £47/£55 amazon. I got the pinecil for £33 buying from the US store and just having it shipped over to the UK.
You could think about doing that for this smartwatch!
What was the customs charge like?
God damn
The battery truly does last for an impressive amount of time, even actively connected to gadgetbridge on my phone. I get a bit more than a week out of it typically. I can't really say how good the sub counting is I think it's just based on an accelerometer but it doesn't seem any worse than what I had in my Fitbit
Wow! That's a bargain price for any smart watch, let alone one that's all FOSS and made by a small company.
This might make me buy a smartwatch damnit
It's really cool! Both InfiniTime and WASP OS are very easy to modify as well!
WaspOS:
https://wasp-os.readthedocs.io/...
Flashing guide here: https://wasp-os.readthedocs.io/...
InfiniTime:
Do you recommend buying it sealed or the development version? What does sealed mean?
Sealed means the back plate is glued on whereas the development version lets you remove the back plate with screws. I got the sealed version because it's more water resistant and I've been nasty habit of annihilating my electronics with water but honestly I'd recommend getting the dev version if you want
I've had watches in the past with a screwed back and rubber gasket that were very waterproof. Is the dev version really that easy to destroy?
Unfortunately shipping to Canada would cost more than the device itself.
*Laughs in European. Cheapest I found was 65 euros 'with free shipping'. I regret going for a Chinese band instead for the same total cost due to the 'overpaying' fallacy.
Wish you luck! I tried that for some other product, they told me that aside from tax I had to pay a fee that was much higher than the total cost.
This looks legit. Any info on how well it connects to an iPhone or Android?
Works great using an app like gadgetbridge. It Syncs notifications, music control, HR, step counter, etc. It apparently has GPS text directions but I've never used it.
It connects to my android extremely reliably using Gadgetbridge
iPhone is supported through Infinilink: https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniLink
and I can know for a fact that it won't phone home with my location or other data to any corporation behind the scenes.
if you've already got a wearable, check if Gadgetbridge supports it. it can replace your gadget's companion app so that it doesn't connect to the cloud. that's what I use with the Mi Band 7 that I got as a gift.
It's so expensive in Europe :'((
Look very good, sadly the shipping is very costy for where I live but I will buy it sometime
Edit : do you know any other open-source smartwatch with more fitness tracker?
I don't think so, no, it's pretty sparse on the health tracking side of things.
Me too lol
I flashed the updated infinitime firmware to my watch once, when I first got it, and it's worked flawlessly since with Gadgetbridge, so if you don't want to tinker with it and just want a simple no-nonsense smartwatch it's great for that. And everything seems to be in such a good working state it doesn't need updates at all. At least thats how it is for me. But it is relatively actively maintained.
As for needing to know a lot of microcomputing to do any tinkering with it, it really doesn't seem like it — the APIs and stuff for adding apps and functionality to either of the major operating systems for the pinetime seam really easy to use. WaspOS even uses MicroPython for everything! Yes, you can open it up, but even that isn't to do anything very complicated, it just makes access to the chips for direct flashing (instead of OTA flashing) possible, so that you can recover if you brick it. It doesn't require any crazy low-level or microcomputing knowledge.
I actually don't think it supports iPhone. You need a companion app on the phone to talk to the watch and the app for iPhone is abandoned.
I get equivalent notifications from my Android phone on my watch, and I'm almost positive the PineTime is compatible with iOS too, so tentatively yes?
I dunno
Not yet. The camera is still not really usable and the battery life is very bad. It's all about Linux optimisation though, so it has huge potential.
how strong is the metronome? the metronome wearable from soundbrenner is bit to big and masc. my wife is searching for a smaller wearable and I have read the pinetime has a metronome function <3.
It does. Its one of the stock apps. I'd say it works pretty well but I don't like it as you can pick up the vibration sound on a condenser mic.
I have one. To be honest, it's super expensive to have it shipped to Europe. The step counter and the sensors in general arent that great. Perhaps it will get better with time and development
Alright, I'm almost convinced. I've been wanting one since they dropped.
My Galaxy Active 2 is showing its age and the idea of a smartwatch with the battery life it claims is intriguing. Are those numbers accurate?
I get about 4-5 days with moderate use and a constant BT connection to my phone. There's a few big impacts like the heart rate monitor, so I never use it
Another open source smartwatch called Watchy that uses an e-ink display: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XsnKivTZDoQ
Does the PineTime have an always on sunlight readable display like the Pebbles?
@dataterm.digital
"High tech, low life."
"The street finds its own uses for things."
We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.
The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.
The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.
This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).
Welcome in, choom.
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@dataterm.digital
"High tech, low life."
"The street finds its own uses for things."
We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.
The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.
The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.
This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).
Welcome in, choom.
go to feed...
I'd be down for something that was more designed around all the fun bio data smart watches can collect. I'd even be down for a slightly invasive implant that would collect data about my health so I can better keep track of it all. Apple seems the most interested in the health stuff from what I've seen and I have no interest in the apple ecosystem. Open source health stuff seems like an opportunity to latch on to before the corpos make the stuff and sell the data.
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