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- Hacker News
- If you want a Casio watch and are traveling to Japan, just get one at a second hand shop there (WonderEx, Second Street, ...). They are tend to be well stocked on the Casio cruft.
I have a Casio PHYS STR-800, nonworking. I got it two decades ago because of the large lap memory (and unusual look, too); I was doing a lot of running, including track training and such.
It short circuited one day. Put in a battery, and it drained the thing in a minute. Put in another one, same thing.
It's been sitting in the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet since like 2011.
by kazinator - I really like my F91W case with a Sensor Watch Pro board and accelerometer sensor.
My favorite features:
- Piezo alarm is much louder.
- Countdown time can be incremented by tapping the watch.
- LED color can be changed by adjusting RGB values.
- It features sunrise/-set and moon phase info/calendar.
- I changed the week day names to German abbreviations.
- There are lots of intriguing watch faces that you can compile into your firmware.
Sadly, the project is in some disarray as the originator apparently lost interest and the community isn't moving uniformly. Would love to see such a project for Casio with 4 buttons as this would allow for a lot more interesting use cases ... the pinnacle would be a board for their calculator watches. That would be rad.
The Sensor Watch forum on Discord is pretty active.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
by raffael_de - > Sadly, the project is in some disarray as the originator apparently lost interest and the community isn't moving uniformly.
What's going on? Can you give me more details?
- There must be some significant creativity with limitations of the physical display layout! [1]
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/img/87bb/b84945f8-c8fd-4a06-9291...
by nomel - > Countdown time can be incremented by tapping the watch.
This one is fascinating to me. Can you set it to start a countdown timer by tapping the watch itself (not a button)? If I could, say, tap the watch to start a 30m countdown timer whenever for baking, and then change a setting to make it a 1m30s timer on tap for exercise, that would be huge for me. But maybe that's not what you meant?
by grep_name - Upon seeing "Bluetooth" and "Daily steps" I'd assume this is another watch that requires daily charging, but wow 2y battery w/ CR2016!by yegle
- Yup, the ingenuity to pull this off fascinates me every day, too.by minusLik
- Amazing! I was proud that my OnePlus smartwatch needs recharging only once every 5 days, but 2 years is unbelievable. The difference is partly due to the LED screen of my smartwatch, LCD is much more energy efficient.
- Several of the G-Shock models (lacking BT and pedometer) advertise up to 10 year life.
Either way, vastly more appealing than a charge-it-daily "smartwatch" IMO.
by dredmorbius - It's almost unbelievable that a step-tracker can have 2 years battery.by Jskewel
- Yes, it seems to be a repackaging of the ABL-100WE and has a long battery life. Unfortunately, their app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.by woodson
- Right when I started building a custom F-91W with/for my kids based on sensor watch: https://github.com/joeycastillo/second-movement
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
by ncruces - The sensor watch is actually awesome, if only for turning a cheap casio into a super-accurate quartz watch with temperature compensation.by maybe_pablo
- BIG Warning to anyone thinking about purchasing one of these
You cannot connect the watch to Bluetooth without a proprietary app, and that proprietary app will not let you use the Bluetooth feature without some bullshit called a "CASIO Account". Their privacy policy is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser too.
The absolute state of things.
by wpm - If the watch gets any popular, it will take at most weeks for someone to vibecode open source app for this.by nout
- I complained to the relevant GDPR authority (German) and never heard back. It's blatantly illegal - overprocessing of PII - to require registration for connecting two devices owned by the same person, in the same room. There's no fathomable necessary or legitimate use.by bux93
- ffs all it needed to do was talk to Apple Health and I’d have bought it.by 00deadbeef
- While Casio app may be despicable, in Android world have a look at https://gadgetbridge.org/.
Gadgetbridge is open source provides a lot of "drivers" for different BT devices from Casio, Sony, Pebble, Garmin to Xiaomi and allows to live without monstrous in size and tracking proprietary apps.
by buccal - Isn't that common across all watches that connect to your phone these days? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Edit: Also, not saying it's a good thing.
by jp0d - While I empathize with your feelings about lock-in, I encourage you to see that we live in an amazingly empowering era. I would wager that with $20 in credits for the LLM flavor of the week and and an equally expensive BLE-to-USB dongle (try the nRF52840 dongle), you will have the protocol reverse-engineered overnight. BLE protocols are often very low-hanging fruit for this type of effort.
Yes, it's annoying this stuff isn't open source from the get-go, but it has never been easier to open hardware up for yourself and others.
- There is an Fdroid app "Casio G-Shock Smart Sync" Not sure if it supports now but most likely may support in future.
This is an unofficial app for Casio G-Shock, Edifice, and Pro Trek watches. It allows you to control your watch, sync data, and configure settings without a Casio ID. It offers a faster, privacy-focused, and more powerful alternative to the official Casio app.
Key Features check ------------------ - No Account Required: Skip the Casio ID login entirely.
From https://fdroid.gitlab.io/jekyll-fdroid/packages/org.avmedia....
by ff00 - It seems to me that it's a slightly more affordable repackaging of the ABL-100WE. The features are the same, so is battery life.
That said, I really like this because the ABL-100WE comes with metal bands and I'd really like another watch with a rubber band :)
https://www.casio.com/de/watches/casio/vintage/product.ABL-1...
by eloeffler - Like their G-Shock watches, the actual area dedicated to showing the time is overwhelmed by superfluous elements. Must be barely 20% of the top surface that actually performs its primary function.
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
by dingaling - You might wanna take a look at Casio AE-1500WH.by maratc
- The only thing my watch displays is the time, any three-hand watch is exclusively dedicated to timekeeping.
- On the principal menu of my G-Shock, I have the time on ~80% of the screen. The rest is 8/19, WED and the seconds. Of course the time is smaller when I go to the tide screen.by orwin
- There are some editions of their models which don't have any of those labels and they look much better. But I think they never went far enough, and design a good looking digital g-shock with big time and date, nothing else. When I was younger, small time display was fine, but now as someone with presbyopia (like any 40+ adult) those digits are just too small.by jq-r
- Nearly 50% of today’s $45,000 Rolex Daytona is taken up by superfluous text like this.by kridsdale1
- Hmmmmmmmm. I've always been a fan of the classic Casio aesthetic, and I want to want it, but this is a strange point in the functionality-vs-price space.
A base F-91W costs less than half that, and my phone can already track steps with reasonable reliability.
An entry-level fitbit costs about the same and monitors way more stats including heart rate, SpO2. Worse battery life and appearance, but if I wanted that featureset it's probably what I'd get.
by Retr0id - > and my phone can already track steps with reasonable reliability
Perhaps, but not everyone carries their phone around with them all the time
by bean469