Anyone building software for wearable tech?

17 points by ssc23 179 days ago | 15 comments

With rings, bands and sunglasses interface are popping up from various companies. Anyone trying to build software for it?

rjmunro 178 days ago |

Not sure if this counts, but someone I know made a javascript interpreter that runs on ESP32, ported it to a smartwatch and wrote a whole open source operating system. He put it on Kickstarter and reached the goal. He now sells the result, and a second one for a different smartwatch: https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

There's an app store here: https://banglejs.com/apps/, but all apps are free and open source in a single github repo.

Lord_Zero 176 days ago | |

This is cool. So "175mAh battery, 4 weeks standby time" what is the battery time during normal use? Not just sitting on a shelf. Use all day at work, sleep tracking during the night, etc.

dariosalvi78 178 days ago | |

I can only recommend Espruino and the BangleJs, great work.

aarondcoleman 179 days ago |

Yes. I built a company around repurposing consumer wearables for health research called Fitabase. 14 years in, we’re a profitable and growing tech company. We support high resolution data capture and export for Fitbit and Garmin. https://www.fitabase.com

guntis_dev 178 days ago |

I've built orienteering training app for Garmin smart watches. Helps me to train in forest without physical orienteering prisms. https://apps.garmin.com/apps/92dfaa42-ebf3-45dc-88f2-ea81859...

Also it was interesting programming journey to use their Monkey C programming language.

bartmichalak 178 days ago |

Yes, we do!

Check out https://github.com/the-momentum/open-wearables

Open Wearables is a self-hosted platform that unifies wearable health data through a single API. Our roadmap also includes some AI-powered features (https://docs.openwearables.io/roadmap)

We're solving a problem we often encounter when building solutions for clients. So we're targeting developers and builders, and therefore ourselves! :) The tricky part: we're trying to build the platform so that it's also useful for individuals who simply want to analyze their data (or the data of their clients, in the case of personal trainers).

Currently supporting Garmin, Polar, Suunto, and Oura Ring (with more data types being added). Next big thing will be releasing Apple Health SDK for Flutter (probably next week).

The project has early contributors and growing Discord community. I'll invite everyone to be a contributor, leave a star or just test the solution! :)

ndom91 178 days ago |

Pebble are releasing a new slew of products and their arguments with rebble aside, are seemingly doing a good job so far prepping SDKs and more to easily write software for the new watches. Including leveraging the banglejs engine mentioned earlier in this thread to enable folks to write apps / watchfaces in javascript!

See: https://developer.repebble.com/docs/

spiffytech 178 days ago | |

Their operating system and phone bridge are also open-source. libpebble drives their wearable ring, so it's not just watches.

keleftheriou 178 days ago |

I’m building a voice-first assistant for Apple Watch.

I feel the Apple Watch is a great form factor, and while other devices can complement it nicely, it’s currently way underutilized.

My app can be used to take notes, query them, look things up online, and a lot of things you’d use ChatGPT for, but from your wrist.

https://x.com/keleftheriou/status/1963399069646426341

jzellis 178 days ago |

I'm working on a simple electron based launcher app for my XReal Air2 Pro AR glasses, which are the display for my Raspberry Pi cyberdeck. Nothing fancy, just an easy touch interface that uses luminosity-based transparency to make a goofy little cyberpunk HUD.

djeastm 178 days ago |

I might be interested in doing so in the future. My use cases would involve glasses and so far all I've seen with potential is Meta, but I can't see them being developer friendly (or consumer-friendly, for that matter).

woumn 178 days ago |

I'm working on a visual watchface builder for Garmin smartwatches currently. Think like Canva but for a watchface. It's not released yet, but coming along well. I'd like to support other brands too, like Pebble.

saltcured 178 days ago | |

Have you looked at garmin.watchfacebuilder.com? What do you intend to do differently/better?

0xMohan 178 days ago |

Better question is do we really want custom apps for wearable other than whatever is the core feature?

Though I can see potential use cases for apps on smart glasses.

krschacht 179 days ago |

I've been keeping an eye on the SDKs for Meta glasses and Even Realities, but they don't yet support much access.