AsteroidOS 2.0 is here with a massive load of new features and support for many more watches.
Thank you to all contributors who made it possible!
Watch the visual demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc
Read the announcement: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/
Enjoy the wrist-sized Linux ride!
Let me first congratulate the devs on this milestone. Not many niche projects with small appeal last this long but this is impressive. Now, if they can get this working on Garmin and Polar watches the ball will really start rolling.
I wish these guys luck.
I like the idea of a smartwatch, but I’m not accepting the Faustian bargain required to wear them. I can see my heart rate as long as Google can see my hearrate? No thanks, pass.
I fully agree with you in wanting to keep your health telemetry private. I too baulked at smart watches for the same reasons. I hate the idea of such info being collected by any company.
I’ve found GadgetBridge paired with a cheap smartwatch to be a good solution for me. It let’s you keep your telemetry local and provides a GUI for the info I want: steps, heart rate, activity, sleep, etc.
It sounds like they have some support for AsteroidOS already too. They also claim “As of the next Gadgetbridge release, it should have full support for AsteroidOS, and feature-parity with AsteroidOSSync.”
If I’m not mistaken, some of the higher-end models from Polar and (maybe?) Garmin work independently of a smartphone.
I seem to have a tendency, a skill, a knack to choose and buy that specific hardware model that is not supported by these cool open source projects.
Same thing happened with PostmarketOS, I have a box full of old phones that are specifically not supported.
It’s a really shitty superpower.
we share the same superpower.
point it however, that is the nature of open source projects, just up to yourself willing to sacrifice time and hardware to test and integrate on your device.
Looking at the list of supported watches, there are only 2 with 5 star support and they seem quite old / obscure. I couldn’t find any to buy second hand anyway.
Nah, it is pretty much if you didn’t buy one of 2 trendy models of the year, then nothing else has ever or will ever be supported (of course you can always write your own drivers but it is a ton of work, especially for non-coders)
I have a thought that a lot of the enthusiasts that go through the pain and effoet of writing all of these drivers for old phones they have were usually the kind of people to buy the best/most popular device of the year
I only want Garmin support T.T
Bro, god damn. I have two Samsung watches and neither is supported 🤦🏽. They’re both older, too.
If it doesn’t support .beat time, I don’t care!
(Just kidding, always happy to see Linux in more places. But I do want my metric time.)
Excellent! I think I still have my fossil Gen 5.
I would think Linux would be way too heavy for these watches. A lot of them use pretty lean MCUs, a far cry from the beefy Qualcomm phone chips that Post market runs on.
Even running zephyr on the NRF52840 can get heavy with adding a bunch of apps to it.
AsteroidOS mostly supports watches that come stock with Wear OS, which is a modified version of Android, which, guess what, runs a Linux kernel. These watches are on the more powerful end of the computing spectrum. As you say, there are a lot of smart watches that use pretty lean MCUs, but those aren’t running AsteroidOS or Wear OS, as noted in this FAQ entry.
Nah, it’s not “too heavy” the linux kernel is running on all kinds of tiny processors.
My limited understanding is, that usually the problem is a lack of support and assistance from the hardware manufacturer to optimise the OS for their hardware.
This is why GrapheneOS and similar have poorer performance on phones et cetera.
Generally correct, but,
GrapheneOS and similar have poorer performance on phones
FWIW my gOS gets 40-50% more battery, likely due to lack of parasitic (see what I did there?) google services.
I would assume it’s highly stripped down similar to what Google does to android with watchos ?
I mean, look at the specs of a smart TV or smart fridge. The specs on them are shit and they run Linux.
Hell there are whole distros designed to run on minimal as fuck hardware.
Maybe not a good example because all TVs and Smart fridges run MCUs (or SBUs) that are 10x-20x more powerful than what is in any smart watch besides the apple watch (where the watch is mostly one gigantic custom IC).
They usually run NXP I.MX Arm M7 processors at the bare bare bare minimum, much more common is an ARM A7 or higher which is a completely different world than the tiny nrf52840 with 192KB of RAM and 1MB of flash that is standard across lower-end smart watches (and doesn’t go upuch with higher end) That is why I was confused. But I guess people get down voted to hell for asking a question lol
