PineTime Hardware Wishlist

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Revision as of 18:42, 2 December 2020 by Caligari (talk | contribs) (→‎Hardware: My hardware wishes)
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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
  • Used sensors should be NDA-free and preferably also blob-free
  • 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 coördinates 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. Can this be fixed?
  • 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.
  • nrf52840 update, that'll allow SPI x4 speed faster than nrf52832 and moreeeee RAM.
  • A couple of pins on the programmer connector to allow UART while developing (currently there is a TX test point on PCB).
  • 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.
  • BMA421 accelerometer doesn't have a datasheet (it seems private to some hardware integrators): take it off and put alternative with open documentation.