Nico's blog

InfiniTime 1.11 "Red Nectarine" - using PineTime's external flash memory!

No major features in that release, but it's preparing the ground for the future!

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What's New?

• 2 new watchfaces:
  • Infineat
  • G7710
• Support for external resources

Support for external resources

External resources means that InfiniTime can now take advantage of the external storage of the PineTime, instead of storing everything on the internal storage, which is a lot more limited (512KB vs. 4MB for the external one).

One interesting use case is storing large files, such as images and fonts, in the external storage, thereby increasing the amount of space available in the internal storage, and allowing to add new features to InfiniTime! :-)

New watchfaces

• Infineat:
  • a colored watchface, which displays the date, time, number of stops, along with the Pine64 logo.
  • it is even possible to customize the colors by long-pressing the screen

• G7710:

  • Comes from the famous Casio G-Shock G7710
  • includes week and day number, number of steps, heart-rate, date, bluetooth and battery icons, as well as battery percent
  

Other improvement and bugfixes

Among others, this version brings:

• new sleep mode: very nice new feature, allowing to wear your PineTime during the night without causing the menus to activate.
  Basically, it disables notifications, touch wakeup, motion wakeup and chimes.

• more timeout options (for when the display goes to sleep):
  • 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 30 sec.
• swapped text colors on notifications, making them more readable,
• the Alarm app now uses a Counter widget, making it easier to use:

Installing external resources on SailfishOS with Amazfish

Generalities

As mentioned in the release notes, installing the external resources requires a client that supports it.

At the time of writing, only itd and Amazfish support it. You'll need to run the latest version of Amazfish (2.1.0) to have this feature supported.

Doing it is quite easy: you install it as any other firmware upgrade, but the client will recognise that's it's a resource file, and will upload accordingly to your PineTime.

Doing it on Sailfish OS with Amazfish

However, it's not enough: when I tried it on my Sailfish OS device, Amazfish would correctly identify the file as a resource, but clicking on the "Send file" would do nothing.

As usual, Adam and JF have been super reactive, and it turns out that the bluez version that ships with SFOS is a bit old, so you'll have to use a dev version that Adam is providing.

Here's how you do it:

• Prerequisites: you need SSH access to SFOS + devel-su access,
• Add the repo with
  zypper ar https://repo.sailfishos.org/obs/home:/piggz:/harbour-amazfish-dev/sailfish_4.4.0.58_aarch64
  (if using aarch64, e.g. on 10 II / 10 III),
• refresh packages with zypper ref
• update packages (including bluez) with zypper update

Note: you will have to "ignore" the warning about repo not being signed.

Once done, restart Bluetooth with:

• systemctl daemon-reload
• systemctl restart bluetooth

and stop/start Amazfish Background service from the UI (Pulley menu: Settings > Applications Settings)

And you can finally upload the resource files from Amazfish (provided you already upgraded to InfiniTime 1.11, of course!)

Wrap Up

Even though it looks like the main features are 2 new watchfaces, having the ability to use the external storage means a lot for the future of InfiniTime, so this is very exciting!

The other improvements (sleep mode, ...) are also welcome.

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Tags: PineTime