PineTime Hardware Wishlist

This page contains a list of things people wish PineTime did differently

Hardware

• Long pressing the button should power-cycle the watch without any software being involved
• Other display tech could be explored. A transflective LCD would probably be a nice option. Or potentially OLED?
• Touchscreen should possibly have a configurable sensitivity level for both glove-wearing and droplet-resistance. Preferably it should still be a capacitive one, a resistive touchscreen would have too many trade-offs.
• A slightly bigger 256×256 pixel graphics display size is preferable for its binary alignment, affording some low-level simplicity – it has the property that its X and Y coordinates are each addressable with a single byte, with no out-of-bounds; its total number of pixels is 65536 (another power of 2), and each pixel is addressable with exactly 2 bytes, with perfect efficiency. The IBNIZ (Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo) virtual machine, designed for fun minimalist demoscene graphics, has chosen 256×256 for its virtual display, and makes use of these simplicity advantages. If PineTime also chose 256×256 then it would be a target platform for unclipped IBNIZ demoscene programmes, which would be really fun to play around with on one's wrist!
• A full redraw on the display takes 120ms at the very least, which is 8Hz. A smooth scrolling/usage/animation experience would be 30Hz minimum, preferably 60. I heard a rumor that the SPI connection to the display is a bottleneck.
• Some sort of scroll wheel would be nice for convenience.
• Changed GPIO assignment so more functionality is available (i.e. NFC and VSYNC)
• Wireless charging, or Qi Charging capability
• An external RTC circuit saving the current time to allow the main MCU go to deep-sleep.
• nRF5340 update: QSPI, CryptoCell + Secure Key Storage, has more RAM, a coprocessor and the possibility to expose USB through power pins
• Preferably a pre-certified MCU module with a ceramic antenna
• Version without sensors but maybe bigger battery
• A couple of pins on the programmer connector to allow UART while developing (currently there is a TX test point on PCB). (Note: There's ARM SemiHosting and Segger RTT)
• Connect the pin of LCD controller that allows RD/WR from it in order to save RAM on the MCU.
• LCD must be centered on case. Currently is not and watchfaces seems different when clock is put on the other wrist.
• A NFC antenna around the case, connected to the NFC pins.
• Used sensors should be NDA-free and preferably also blob-free. For example the BMA421 accelerometer doesn't have a datasheet (it seems private to some hardware integrators): a more open one would be much easier to develop for. Special attention should be paid to advanced features, such as step counting integration or flick detection.
• A future PineTime could have a built in FTDI chip connected to a USB-C port, which will allow flashing a sealed device, just like Arduino. The same USB-C could also be used for charging.