hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3397.txt

Episode: 3397
Title: HPR3397: What is a PineTime
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3397/hpr3397.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:41:36

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3397 Fortusity, the 10th of August 2021.
Today's show is entitled, What is a Pin Time?
It is hosted by Daniel Person and is about 10 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, in this podcast high, talk a little bit about the pin time.
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Hello Hacker's and welcome to another podcast.
My name is Daniel Person and I'm going to talk a little bit about Pin Time.
It's a watch with some smarts in it.
If you want a nice watch or accessory, you should get a Rolex or an Apple Watch or anything like that.
If you want a smart watch or something that has a real smarts in it,
get an Android device with Android Wear or something like that.
This is not the thing you want to get if you really want the functionality.
This is more of a development platform, open source.
You can be a part of something that are currently building.
And I thought it was so interesting so I got one.
I bought it for about 27 dollars and as I live in Sweden,
it's 30 dollars in shipping and then another 40 dollars in taxes
before I actually got the device.
Because we don't want anything to be staring out local businesses or anything like that.
So if you buy something abroad, it can be really costly.
But this device, when I got it, it's very standard.
It has the time of course and the date and also counts the number of steps.
I take each day.
It has an accelerator, accelerate meter and also can measure your heartbeat if you want.
I tried a heartbeat sensor and I think it don't really work on me.
I laid flat on my bed and I had about 250 in a heartbeat, beats per minute.
And that's just not right.
But I looked into it and there is a lot of mechanics and a lot of math and a lot of code that actually goes into it.
So perhaps you can make a better measurement if you change some of the factors.
It really works like there is a light, a green light that shines on your skin.
I have some thing that reads the pulse under the skin with that.
And I'm sunburned at the moment.
So maybe that could be a reason it can't really read well.
It also says that it can use this light in different intensities.
You can change how hard the light shines.
And perhaps that could be something that you want to change depending on the light circumstances.
The light circumstances in the room that you are at the moment.
You can also change how often the light should flicker and how sensitive the membrane that reads the data should be and so on.
So there is a lot of different variables that you could change.
And I think everything there is hard code and then there is a lot of code that reads the actual measurement.
When it comes to the actual step count there is a component that does all of that for you.
And you can ask it for the step count and you can reset it.
The problem I had was that that component got reset when I reset the clock of course.
And the clock is built in such a way that actually loses the connection to my phone sometimes.
And the best way to get it to reconnect is to restart the watch.
And if I do that the count was set to zero.
But pretty recently in the version 1.3 of the clock they added the little FS.
So a small file system for these kind of clocks.
It has about 512 kilobytes of RAM that you can add the actual operating system to.
And I think the operating system at the moment is 300 kilobytes.
So it has some ROMs to grow.
But it's still a very small space.
And then you have another four megabytes of data that you can save on the device.
And I think that's where you have the actual save of this little FS.
So what I did was I went into the code found where they read the data for the specific steps.
And I saw there that once a day they reset the step counter.
So you only get the number of steps you have taken that day.
Or that day cycle.
And I thought that perhaps I could make this better.
So I actually made the change.
So I got the value and then reset the counter.
So I had that back to zero.
And then I saved the result in a file and read that file back.
So if I had a value, I read that value and the number of steps that I had from the sensor.
And then wrote it back.
And in that case, I always had a fresh value that I could present to the user.
That is the correct value for that is in the file.
But as your understand that will be always incrementing for all time.
If you just have one file.
So I changed the file naming.
So it actually have steps underscore the date current date.
So year month day.
And then dot that for the file name.
That means that every day that you start a new,
the file will not be there will be created and you will start at zero again.
So that was how I implemented something that could actually stay.
I've run that for a couple of days now.
And it actually works pretty fine.
So I think I will make a pull request for that.
So I pull request is when you're working on something on GitHub,
you can tell the maintainers that I want you to pull my changes into your code branch.
And so this can be a part of the release later on.
So I want to do create something like that and give them some of my ideas around the subject.
Perhaps they think that I did it implemented well.
I haven't written C++ code in ever so long.
I think at least 20 years or something.
So it's not the best code, but it works.
So if you are interested in getting a device that you can have on your wrist
that is clock like and can actually tell the time that's one of the feature.
It doesn't really well.
And want to be a part of the development of more features.
The clock has some games and it has some controls to control your media and so on.
Those don't really work at the moment.
It also can show you notifications.
Doesn't really work well in my opinion either.
But there is potential here.
There is a future and its development really fast.
I see that they are making changes every day to the code.
So this is an interesting and fun project.
I hope that you found this podcast interesting.
I hope that you are excited about this product.
Perhaps you are interested in getting your own or just discussing it.
Leave a comment in the comment section and I will read all of them.
And until next time, use more open source.
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