One year of InfiniTime: what has been achieved?
In this article, I am looking at all the things that happened in one year of development of InfiniTime, PineTime's default firmware.
Rationale
If you're reading my blog, you know that I have written extensively on the
PineTime in general, and InfiniTime, its default firmware, in particular.
You can find all those articles
here.
To be precise, I wrote my first article on January 22, 2021 - hence the present article being published one year after :)
This article is a bit special though: I'm not covering any new features or firmware; I just wanted to sit down and look back at 12 months of InfiniTime, to see what was accomplished in one year of hard work by the community.
There's no picture of InfiniTime, since I have tested pretty much all the features and versions in previous articles - additionally, you can find a detailed list of features, broken down by firmware version, here.
So bucckle up and follow me!
InfiniTime in 2021
Default firwmare: 0.7.1
If you ordered your PineTime in January 2021, it came preloaded with InfiniTime 0.7.1.
Although the watch was completely usable, including notifications, it was still missing a lot of features, namely:
- counting steps,
- heart-rate measurement,
- vibrations,
- no alarm app,
- no countdown app,
- no way to configure the date/time manually (has to be done by synchronising from a companion app),
Also, there was a super annoying BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) bug, which caused the Bluetooth connection to be broken after about a day: in order to have it back, you had to soft-reset the watch (by holding the button for ~8 seconds).
State in early 2021
Upgrading in January 2021 meant InfiniTime version 0.11.0, bringing since 0.7.1:
- Heart-rate sensor application
- Navigation app: InfiNav (works with PureMaps)
- Music and Paint applications
- 2 new games: Pong and 2048
- Touchmodes allows gestures and polling
- Manual validation of the updated firmware (allows rollback in case of issue)
- Improved battery life - up to 7 days
- New application menu, can display up to 6 pages
That makes for a much more usable PineTime, although we're still missing steps counter, and the BLE bug was still there.
End of Q2 2021
The first quarter of 2021 saw 4 more releases (0.12 to 0.15), as well as the introduction of codenames for releases, based on fruits names.
At the end of March '21, InfiniTime had gained the following features:
- Vibrations,
- Call notifications,
- Stopwatch application,
- a new analog watchface.
Even though the BLE connectivity got better, there were still issues, and still no steps counter :(
InfiniTime 1.0.0 "Red Cherry"
Finally a first, official stable firmware!
Released in April '21, this version brings:
- Steps counter,
- Wake on wrist rotation,
- 12/24h display,
- Vibration enable/disable,
- Big UI rework,
- User settings saved in flash memory.
Those are pretty big achievements, hence the switch to an official release.
Of course there are still some minor things missing (including the outstanding
BLE bug which gets really annoying), but we're getting there :)
End of Q2 2021
The second quarter of '21 saw "only" 2 releases (1.1.0 "Dragon Fruit" and 1.2.0 "Blue-purple Elderberry", bringing:
- Steps Goal,
- an improved Stopwatch app
- 2 new applications: Timer and Metronome
End of Q3 2021
4 new firmwares: 1.3.0 to 1.6.0, bringing:
- a new watchface (PineTimeStyle),
- integration of LittleFS, allowing using PineTime's external memory (4 MB), rather than the internal flash (512 KB),
- new Alarm app!
- various improvements to the existing applications,
- and finally, a fix for the BLE bug!!! \o/
So at the end of the third quarter, we definitely have a completely usable smartwatch, with no more BLE bug (and also the bootloop issue fixed for a long time).
End of Q4 2021
There was only one release during the fourth quarter (well, technically 2, since 1.7.1 fixed an annoying bug):
- Motion Service
- Set Date and Time from the PineTime
- Wake-up on charge
- Faster wake-up time
- Double-tap and long-press button gestures
Wrap Up
As you can see, it's been a busy year for InfiniTime!
I only listed the main features above, but there were many other things
improved, like the usage of GitHub, or various improvements in the UI, stability
etc.
The project has also a lot more developers: one year ago, JF was the main and almost only one, but nowadays, the community is much larger, which means a lot more features are being brought to InfiniTime, so you can expect some super nice things in 2022! :)
Also, the documentation is being rewritten from scratch, to make it easier for both users and developers to jump onboard the InfiniTime train - stay tuned for an update in early '22!
Tags: PineTime