Porting Python to a terrible $3 smartwatch 

"The battery is slightly squidgy, which is a bit concerning" -- the guy who was just poking it with very pointy tweezers 😅

5:55 Funily, two wires are enough, if you are clever. When the Led has sent its pulse, there is a reflection coming back and since Leds work as photocell, a current spike is generated and the current is dependent on what is reflecting. So all the sensor needs is power and ground and some sniffer on the powerline. But i bet this is not implemented🤗

"Running, skipping, and sit-up." I LOVE the skipping option. I think this should be an exercise on more smart watches :D

Well, the heartrate / Sp02 sensor is 100% fake. It's only got 2 conductors and looks like it's just flashing an LED. At a minimum you'd need 4 wires (ground, 1 for photodiode sense, two for the pair of inversely connected LEDs (one IR, one visible).

I absolutely love this. General computing is a basic human right, and this is making it happen. The kids don't have to make computers using redstone in Minecraft anymore, they can simply hack their Temu "smart" watch. It's brilliant.

i love that your desk has a hartrate. amazing. please feed it well

The fact that this watch is a knockoff of a xiaomi band watch, which itself is only 20-40€, is crazy it's a cheaper version of an item that's already cheap!

Pro tip. Instead of stripping your magnet wire manually. Hit it with a flame from a lighter and it will burn the coating right off. Then pinch in a tissue and pull to remove the char. It’s way quicker than scraping it off

while it is garbage, i still find it amazing that you make something like this for THREE DOLLARS. crazy

Great job! I may have to dig my watch up and try your micropython port. I really like the rp2040 programmer too - tks for sharing that with the community.

That's quite hardcore. Thanks for a really interesting hack. And thanks for sharing the code and all the findings.

Nice work - digging around in these things seems like a lot of fun. I've also experienced these "smart watch" devices with the faux biometrics that merely flash a green LED and then make up a bunch of bogus data. Funny thing is that I've got a Xiaomi smartwatch that looks almost identical to this which does have fully functional sensors and works nicely.

I would have taken the wires out through the heart rate monitor window. I enjoyed this video very much. Thank you for taking the time to document your steps. The platform is very close to what I am looking for. Battery life is an issue I would like it to last many days of stand by. Actual use would be just a few minutes per day. I want an vibration alarm once or twice a day, with an ACK button, and a timer and a tiny bit of logging that can do some simple stats like average and totals. My app would probably fit into the RAM.

I normally only subscribe after I've seen a few videos from a channel and am convinced of their quality and them having earned my subscription. But halfway this video I subbed. Great video! Can't wait to binge some others!

Great to see a video which explores a bit closer to the metal. Also nice to see someone else who uses gkrellm - still my system monitor of choice.

Hey man ur desk is alive, its a living organism and this watch is confirmed it for us!! Ladies and Gentleman's we are officially found out FIRST Alien life form!

Interesting video. I like the humorous way of how you very clearly explain how you gained control of this cheap yet interesting piece of hardware. Thank you for sharing! Some years ago Aaron Christobel made an Arduino core for the somewhat similar D6 Fitness tracker. (similar features, monochrome display, nrf5 mcu; equally cheap and crappy watch). On his RU-vid channel you can find a few video's around him hacking that D6 watch, but also quite a few for some other watches such as the P8 as well as many other devices.

Nice to see the TLSR Legacy living on

Thank you so much for sharing that !!!! Funny to see the ST32 disapear for a Pico :D Sometimes changing HW ease SW soooo much.

Fascinating ! even though I understand about 7% of what you did but that was enough for the time to fly by !!.....cheers.

Wow, amazing content! Thank you so much for sharing. Just subscribed. Gonna watch the video in detail on free time..

Always love your vids!

Amazing work, genius!

Totally understand!! I have one that doesn't have the features you mentioned! I DON''T care about fitness at 76!! Same here on that heart rate, since I use a REAL device to check that. They aren't even close!!!

Absolutely great video, i'm going to give this a try too. Just something to think about - you can get brass pogo pads, you solder a wire to the pad, drill a tiny hole in the case for the wire to pass through and then epoxy or uv glue down the pogo pad. Then you can easily 3d print or otherwise make a clip with pogo pins that are spring loaded and press on the pads... the pads are very low profile and used on similar watches that attach to a magnetic charging cable...

i enjoyed the heck out of this video, i did not even realize that it was an hour long lol 30:45 Also i did not know that you could just select the lines where you want to replace a value on vscode the way you did it, thank you

Really good job, really underrated channel.

Hey, i have one of these! As you can imagine, it's sleeping in a drawer, because that's not a great watch! But it might be fun to hack some python into it. nice work. I think mine was slightly more expensive and does detect motion (though not very reliably), will see if which parts are fake when opening it.

"LED/Heart sensor" LOL!!! Brilliant.

this was a lot of fun, what an interesting and weird mcu. also, how weird that the ble stack consumes so much ram for no good reason. I don't think the stack will be reverse engineered right now, but hopefully someone does it. same for the arm thumb assembly to tc32 assembly. but we can dream!

you should use 30 AWG silicone wire don't even bother with the transformer wire, it brakes even if you just observe it because you collapse it's wavefuntion and it's so fragile that it's the only thing holding it together

This was absolutely fascinating!

Entertaining project!

Came for the video, subbed for the chip tunes!

Excellent, i do have one of these because i heard people were hacking on them. I wish there was a more watch-like version with more screen and maybe real touch or a couple more HMI inputs and more battery and maybe an accelerometer or something. I had one which was more of like an MTK phone in a watch form factor which i bought for 5€ but a series of unfortunate accidents befell it while i was trying to do things to it.

For that price it's amazing it works at all, yes it's terrible, but what else would you expect for $3? You're getting a colour touch screen smart watch that's effectively a full computer that has given you hours of fun.

Hi, nice video and great work. I didn't think about porting micropython for that MCU family and I think the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC thermometer that pvvx is making firmware for might be even better target for micropython as it has much more SRAM and might be better documented/understood thanks to pvvx (and others) work.

Great video!, thanks!

Great video!

I would love to get RIOT OS support for these devices. We could build some fun stuff with IPv6 over BLE. Fun IoT home automation shenanigans.

what a great video! new subscriber here and new fan😊

This is good stuff. Thanks

I spent 9.99 yuan on live streaming shopping in China and purchased a smartwatch for approximately 1.3 US dollars. You can make phone calls and have a built-in app that allows you to connect to your phone using Bluetooth. I also bought Bluetooth earphones for 1.99 yuan, about 0.25 US dollars. It can be charged, similar to Apple's Bluetooth earphones.

i don't understand a thing but im glad i watched the whole video. amazing!

I have one of these I found in the bin at work, mine's battery is also squishy and feels pressurized. I think they sell them with pre-aged batteries, or terribly sealed ones.

Faskinating plus luv those ant512 tunes !

Slightly squidgy? Spicy Pillow!

Would love to see you do something like this with an entry-level Amazfit, which these intend to imitate. Of course they're more than 3€, have a lot of high-level documentation, and are less archaic; but the contrast would be very cool to see.

Oh damn! That’s even cheaper and crappier than the Huawei and Xiaomi bands I’ve been buying. They have been perfect at the only few things I would need them to do: Sleep tracking, Time & Date, Simple workout/steps/calorie counters and maybe heartrate. They have been waterproof and with a simple update to the mainscreen a good background that sips battery for close to a month of actual use. It is far better than any other “smart” device as they last anywhere over a week to close to a month and I can do simple swims or for gods sake just wash my hands without worrying about them. I did upgrade to a Huawei GT2 and have enjoyed it, and I did upgrade the Wife to a second hand Apple Watch gen 4, but her battery life is abysmal to less than a day with tons of restrictions to save as much battery as possible. What you have there in the video should not exist. It is manufactured junk.

damn that is awesome

Amazing video! By the way, what is the model of your keyboard?

I have one of those named Canyon sb01bn, I wondered what makes it work. Out of the box it didn't work. I resolder almost everything and start working. Squishing the whole unit makes it go nuts and do random presses. If I put more pressure the whole UI flips upside down. What a great E-waste product.

I've been holding on to one of these thinking I might hack it in some useful way, but after watching this it seems best to just throw it away.

5:20 Lots and lots of air in it. To say it in Steve terms; make it smaller!

After seeting this, i really wonder what you could do with something a little more powerful like a Samsung Fit3. Considering that you know so much about this kinda stuff, i wonder if you could get Android 1.0 or 1.5 running on that. Like, yeah, Android 1.0 needs 32MB of RAM, double the quantity in the Fit3, but it has enough internal storage for swap RAM. But i really doubt that 1.5 would be able to run on that. Either way, it would be a very interesting thing to see if you ever want to do it.

The screen could be using half duplex SPI. The data line is switching between being MISO & MOSI. The rounded screen i have somewhere is made that way.

hackable, cheap and smart. "terrible" doesnt serve much of a purpose. i find it distracting. and offensive. Terrible recommendations are commonly of little demand id say. Thats why i got here way later than i like to be. Outstanding content. Glad i didn't miss it in the noise.

Maravilhoso o seu trabalho amigo.

I thought magnet wire melted its coating during soldering, no need to strip it.

Hi sir, i really love your work of converting a boring useless gadget into something more useful Can you also do the same for the Spotify car thing I would like the option whether to choose a esp32 s3 for iot projects or a mini computer like raspberry pi zero 2 w for mini linux computer Or a simple hdmi display with touch output through usb c port with the dial control and display and touch screen and touchscreen It shouldn't only be confined to car automation, it should also be programmable and everything like a regular esp32 I am really looking forward to it

Interesting and amazing! Thanks for the video. 1:10:58 XD

Take care of you!

Wow highly entertaining. With vids like this who needs a university class?

Awesome video, as always. Just one question remains: Does it run Doom? ;-)

Greetings. I’m super interested in that Elikliv microscope you use. Which model is it and how do you like it? Considering purchasing one. Many thanks and cheers on a great video.

people: ahhhh. AI is taking over coding and engineers. youtube: check this shit out.

When not connected to your watch and only used for telling time, these things last 10 to 14 days on a single charge 👌

Too long video. Problem is, I love every second of it, even when the Atari music pops up.

I don't know how accurate the heart monitor is, but heart rate and oximeter is likely legit. The BP? No idea how it would do it. The sensor is an LED/Sensor Pair. The Oximeter uses the colour of reflected light to determine how oxygenated your blood is, the heart rate monitor works in a similar way but I believe it uses amount of light reflected rather than the colour. I say its likely legit because the sensors for doing that are cheap. The accuracy however is a lottery.

Cool, is it possible to change firmware via Bluetooth like OTA?

Man I am still using S2. I like its narrow shape and long battery life compared to other watch

Essentially an arm microcomputer for $3 nifty!

gkrellm of a boss!

The RESET button is there to erase all the data about machines that was paired through bluetooth so you can pair again

Glad that the source code is in English and not in Chinese!

instead of 'ampy,' you can use 'mpremote', which is the standard tool now.

Couldn't finishing watching! Hated the 80's music!

The display different color change is caused by the polarized case lens. Seems it dimm the screen brightness and affects the color.

i understood 1%, regardless of my understanding, super cool shit!!! TIL there is a "superpython" for microcontrollers!

/me nods vigorously. enamel wire is annoying for everything except making inductors and transistors, where most of the time is spent winding and not soldering.

How about making it control a strong heavy-duty brushless motor to drive the Big Ben clock on the Palace of Westminster in London, England. :)

I'd try CircuitPython as it is more solid than Micropython

Dream come true ❤

That kerning gave me cancer

hardware people are insane 😮 so cool

that's what I live for!

I always wondered why nobody did a game to play with smart bands, like flappy bird or so. Seems its no as easy as i though

what was that p command you used as a calculator? some sort of shell alias calling python?

The UI and look is like a Mi Band (i have one)

you sound quite like Roddy McDowall

Damn you need so much stuff to hack on those things!!!, I want to run even simple JS application (default apps and faces run JS) on my Mi Band 7 pro, but thing is so locked down, even doesn't have com port all through bluetoothLE over encrypted connection. I mean it's good that connection is encrypted but like it's too locked down for hacking!!

TSomeone tshould tslap the tperson tresponsible tfor tadding t tto tall tthe tmnemonics. What an utterly ridiculous thing to do.

for the price i think its not too bad

awesome i love fucking around with smartwatches one of the reason i got a samsung galaxy watch 6 my parents think i use it for sleeptracking and calling and texting which i do but i sideloada shit ton of android apps on that thing

5:50 Is it just me, or does this battery looks already ballooned🤔

Pretty crazy though $3 lol... it reminds me of those vapes people throw away If they had microcontrollers/harvest em, chain em parallel compute idk... not worth it but yeah python is funny too easier to write than C++ but is it worth the cost

Shame it'd be too big, but having micropython on CP/M would have been an interesting idea! ;)

Well, it's not the watch that is only ugly, it even runs the most ugly "language", if you can call it that. I'm seriously surprised it does not crash on some untested line. LOL

Industrial design and UI cribbed from the Mi Band 6/7 (which costs 16* the price)

*Summary* *1. The Terrible Smartwatch (**0:00**):* * A cheap (~$3) fitness tracker smartwatch with questionable accuracy and features. * Features include: step counter, heart rate monitor (likely fake), sleep tracker, message notifications, music control, and weather. * Connects to smartphones via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). * Powered by a Telink TC32 CPU with 512KB flash, 16KB RAM, and BLE hardware. *2. Disassembly and Exploration (**5:00**):* * The watch is easily disassembled revealing a simple design. * Contains a touch sensor, small screen, battery, vibration unit, and a surprisingly accessible microcontroller (MCU). * Test pads on the PCB provide access to UART, reset, SWS (Single Wire Debug) and other signals. *3. Building a Debug Interface (**9:39**):* * The author initially attempts to use an STM32 Blue Pill as a debugger following existing instructions, but encounters issues. * After troubleshooting, the author develops a custom debugger using a Raspberry Pi Pico, which proves successful (20:42). * The Pico's PIO hardware simplifies the implementation of the unique debug protocol. *4. Deep Dive into the TC32 CPU (**21:58**):* * The Telink TC32 CPU is not an ARM processor, but appears to be a close derivative of the ARM Thumb instruction set. * Analysis of the assembly code suggests the TC32 is essentially a rearranged subset of Thumb, potentially for licensing reasons. * This makes the assembly code relatively easy to understand and work with. *5. Exploring the SDK and Writing Code (**27:15**):* * The Telink SDK, while not extensively documented, is relatively straightforward and easy to use. * It provides basic functionalities like GPIO control, UART communication, and access to hardware timers. * The author demonstrates the process of writing a simple program to blink an LED and send data over UART (30:07). *6. MicroPython to the Rescue (**36:19**):* * The author successfully ports MicroPython to the smartwatch, providing a full Python environment within its limited resources. * Despite the 16KB RAM constraint, MicroPython functions well, allowing for scripting, defining functions and classes, and interacting with hardware. * The implementation includes a file system, allowing for storing and running Python scripts directly from the flash memory. *7. Challenges and Future Work (**49:25**):* * The watch's battery life is a significant concern, as the current implementation lacks proper power management and runs the CPU at full power constantly. * Implementing sleep modes and utilizing interrupts for more efficient power consumption is crucial for practical use. * The BLE stack provided in the SDK consumes a significant portion of the available RAM, limiting its practicality with MicroPython. * A more lightweight BLE stack or optimizations to the existing one are needed for Bluetooth functionality. *8. Conclusion (**1:03:30**):* * Despite some challenges, these cheap smartwatches offer an interesting platform for hacking and experimenting with embedded systems. * The accessibility of the MCU, coupled with the power of MicroPython, opens up possibilities for creating custom applications and functionalities. * Further exploration and development can unlock the full potential of these devices, potentially leading to unique and innovative projects. i used gemini 1.5 pro to summarize the transcript