the more chips you have, the more complex the project becomes. BOM is one thing, every chip needs support passives and oscillators, but now you also need to coordinate communication between the chips, you need to devise a way to update firmwares and access both chips for debugging purposes... that might be worth to trade off for less battery life.

The "high-end" modern MCUs are pretty great, you have the NRF offerings, but also the likes of the ESP32 where you can get Bluetooth and WiFi in a single package.

Personally these days I would lean towards the ESP32, they continue to iterate on it nicely and it has great community support. I'm personally developing a smart watch platform based on micropython.

It's just a watch. You don't need a full UNIX computer to tell time, or to record heart rates or pinging AWS for those matters.

The Cortex-M33 core in the SiFli chip will be much faster than the M4 cores that the fastest released Pebble watches used, so a faster MCU than this is not something that's needed. However, more battery life is very welcome, and the fact that they're using MCUs with integrated Bluetooth this time seems to be a huge part of the upgrade from about a week of battery life to about a month of battery life.

I still rock my OG Pebble and while I am excited they're coming back, I have no plans to upgrade.

Like you, my needs are simple; vibrating alarm, notifications, but with one key factor; I need a display that I can read in broad daylight that plays nice with my far-sighted eyes. The eInk display on the OG Pebbles hits the mark. Being able to read a text without pulling out my phone is also nice.

Plus they can be got on eBay for about $30 USD and a fresh battery is about $15, so they don't break the bank. The Rebble.io community's work is still functioning well enough for my use, as well.

Would Withings[1] watches not fit the bill? I have a ScanWatch and the battery life lasts almost a month.

1: https://www.withings.com/

Apparent my wish for a fitness tracker that's not a watch is also pretty niche. I know that there are rings, but I also don't like rings.

Basically I want a bracelet, if it must be on my arm, but ideally it would be an ankle bracelet. I'm not sure that would provide a convenient spot to get heart rate, or data beyond steps.

Same boat, Apple watch has terrible UX (1cm fingertip in a 2cm screen??!?), tries to do too much and not to my liking.

Pebble allows me to walk away from my phone because I will get the notifications (text or phone call) and can see enough to decide to respond.

Pebble is pretty lightweight and if you load up this watchface you'll feel right at home: https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/52f0939b1ac7948708001fc9

As per your last link, the current Mi Bands fill that niche pretty well. Screen, but decent battery life and small enough to not get in the way.

I agree. I’ve been looking for a “smart” watch strap or strap clasp I can use with my vintage seiko watch. I just want vibration alerts when very specific things happen on my phone. My wife is calling etc. Dont need all the features or display of a typical smart watch. Too distracting.

This might be out of scope, but citizen makes the W770, I recently bought one for <200US lightly used. It manages to be a pretty good chronograph , BLE with an alarm and vibration motor (with a somewhat neglected strange little ecosystem of scriptable notifications).

As a watch, it does require that you read the manual completely to understand its various interface paradigms, but it’s reasonable given that there is no display per se, only hands, to show all of the information. Also, you may need to synchronize the hands at first setup, that baffled me at first lol.

It’s efficiently solar powered using a super capacitor, with months of battery life if left in the dark, no battery concerns at all if you wear it (unless maybe you are an actual vampire that also cannot tolerate artificial light)

The supercapacitor can be replaced if it wears out, seems to be reliable for about 15-20 years based on their other watches.

I like mine quite a lot, it’s a well built actual timepiece, put it on and forget about it if you want. It doesn’t ask you to do anything for it to just do its job, year after year.

Citizen may have other options as well with BLE, idk.

Id love to see someone reverse engineer the notification / BLE communication protocol and create an open source companion app - the possibilities for hacker-y types would be pretty cool.

> I want a dumb watch with vibration notifications.

Same. Notifications are rarely time-critical. A few years ago I noticed that I kept getting distracted by my phone alerting to some nonsense which really didn't matter, so I completely disabled all notifications. I'll just look at it once every few hours to respond to incoming messages.

A regular smart watch would be pretty pointless for me. Getting stuff like message notifications on my wrist would be a huge anti-feature. However, it would be pretty nice to have a convenient way to set an alarm, which will vibrate on my wrist when it goes off. I want a "leave now to catch the bus" reminder, or a "it's time to take a break" reminder! That's all, nothing more, no need to add any fancy sensors.

BLE radio device firmware is always going to be provided as binary blobs for a combination of IP and regulatory reasons.

There's two big factors that make software compatibility very important for this product specifically.

1. His team is positively tiny compared to what Pebble used to have, and the less software work that's needed, the better.

2. All of the apps and watchfaces people wrote for the original Pebbles were distributed as compiled ARM binaries, so if you picked an MCU with an entirely different instruction set, you'd lose backwards compatibility. ESP32 would fall into that category, for example (not that it would have been a good choice anyway).

It is for me, I don't care about any of those features. I just want a watch I can customize a bit that gets notifications and can do rudimentary heart rate monitoring. If I have to charge it more than once a week I won't wear it.