InfiniTime developers recently released a new version of InfiniTime (v 1.11) for the PineTime. Along with several bug fixes and improvements, comes two new watch faces and a special FOSDEM 2023 edition. FOSDEM 2023 is scheduled for February 4th and 5th in Brussels, Belgium. More on that later.
PineTime developers have found a neat way to store more code on the smartwatch by leveraging the external flash memory. The trick is to flash the Resources file to this external memory. It’s not all that difficult, but here is a quick guide for anyone interested in flashing the Resources file to the external flash memory of the PineTime using a phone with postmarketOS. In this case, I used my OnePlus6. I ran into a few issues along the way, so I changed tact until I found the path of least resistance.
Step 0. Important Links
Step 1. Upgrading the PineTime
Before you flash the Resources file, you need to flash the PineTime with the new version of InfiniTime, v1.11 (Ordinary or FOSDEM edition). On pmOS, the easiest way to do this is by using Siglo. Siglo is available in the Alpine package repository.
sudo apk add siglo
With Siglo installed and bluetooth enabled on the phone and the smartwatch, boot Siglo and get a connection between the two devices. This can be a little finicky. The smartwatch should be visible in the list of Bluetooth devices in your phone Settings but you don’t want to connect them using these Bluetooth Settings. Go over to Siglo and keep clicking until the phone lists the smartwatch. You’ll see the name and MAC address of your smartwatch. Don’t click on “Keep paired”, but rather on the device details. Under “Tag”, select InfiniTime 1.11.0 (Ordinary or FOSDEM edition) and under “Asset” select pinetime-mcuboot.app-dfu-1.11.0.zip. Click on Update firmware and let it do its thing.
Once the PineTime is done updating, you can go to the About tab on the PineTime to confirm what build you are running. In my case it reads, “Version 1.11.0 FOSDEM edition”. Now go to the Firmware tab in the Settings and validate the update.
Step 2. Installing InfiniTime Daemon
Siglo does not currently support flashing the Resources file to the smartwatch. You have a few options here. You can use Gadgetbridge on a phone running Android, Amazfish on a phone running Sailfish OS, or InfiniTime Daemon (ITD) on a phone running pmOS.
I tried this first using Gadgetbridge on an older Android phone running LineageOS, but I only ran into issues and was amazed by the amount of permissions Gadgetbridge required to function. I decided to try out ITD.
You may have success installing ITD using the following command. I did not and went ahead and used the instructions from the GitHub page.
sudo apk add itd #Didn’t work for me
I downloaded the latest .apk version of ITD for aarch64 at https://gitea.arsenm.dev/Arsen6331/itd/releases/tag/v1.0.0 onto my OnePlus6.
cd Downloads
sudo apk add --allow-untrusted itd-1.0.0-linux-aarch64.apk
At this juncture I tried to install the GUI for ITD, known as ITGUI, but was unsuccessful using LURE (as suggested on the site), nor was I successful building ITGUI using go and required dependencies. I got the build to start, but hit an error that was not documented online.
Step 3. Flashing Resources to the PineTime
I opted to flash Resources to the PineTime using ITD command line. I started by downloading the Resources file. In this case, it is the file named infinitime-resources-1.11.0.zip. I think it’s important to note that the Resources file from the FOSDEM version includes the two new watch faces from the non-FOSDEM version. I opened two terminals. In the first I ran:
itd
This brought up a six digit code on my watch, which I used to connect it to my phone via command line. In the second terminal I ran the following command:
itctl res load infinitime-resources-1.10.0.zip
This leveraged my initial connection to upload the Resources file to the PineTime. I had to run this command twice though, as the first flash appeared to be complete but was not. This may or may not happen to you.
In the end, it was quite easy, and I got a sense of what ITD has to offer. I’m looking forward to successfully installing the ITD GUI and testing the various types of notifications and support for the PineTime. I suspect it will be the companion app of choice for anyone running pmOS.
