Blog¶

Add GPS track to any recorded sports activity

One of the most missing and wanted features of Gadgetbridge for sports enthusiasts with a Miband (or other Huami device) is to track a sports activity which requests a connection to the original app, to provide GPS tracking. At this point, Gadgetbridge does not have this possibility and as a work around, the 3rd party Heart Rate sensor sharing has been the best option. This works quite well, but has a downside of some activities/data being tracked only in Gadgetbridge while some other data are only in other apps.

Gadgetbridge 0.58.0: Initial Amazfit T-Rex Pro support

Amazfit T-Rex Pro has been added to list of supported devices, thanks to a PR by GeekosaurusR3x who added the initial support for this device. Thanks!

We have fixed an issue which was causing incorrect step and sleep count for people in countries who use timezones with 30 minutes off the global timezone grid, for example Afghanistan, Burma, India, Iran, Sri Lanka and Venezuela. Users with Android 10 and higher can now utilize separate notification channel for low battery warnings. And, some PineTime owners with InfiniTime firmware who might have encountered an issue with firmware flashing should not experience this problem any more thanks to improvements.

Gadgetbridge 0.57.0: Initial limited Mi Band 6 support, Huami fixes

Thanks to a PR, we recently merged, Gadgetbridge 0.57.0 is the first release which supports the new Mi Band 6. We call support limited, since it does not yet support flashing the firmware or watchfaces and not everything is tested yet. But thanks to your donations we were able to order one, which will (once it arrives) enable us to test and improve device support!

This release also fixes flashing watchfaces on GTR2/GTS2 and probably other newer Huami devices, and adds support for flashing the new AGPS bundles which seem to be mandatory for GTR/GTS/GTR2/GTS2/Bip S with updated firmware versions. While you previously had to flash the GPS almanac and CEP files, with the new bundle format (UIHH), it is possible to flash all needed AGPS files in one go. To obtain the files, we recommend using huafetcher. If you want to play with alternative solutions, we also published code which packs UUIH AGPS bundles here.

Gadgetbridge 0.56.1: Many improvements in support for Amazfit Neo and an official Mastodon account

This release is mainly containing culmination of work done on support for the Amazfit Neo. That includes support for firmware updating, notifications and also settings. Do note, that after updating the device to 1.1.2.52 with Gadgetbridge, there might be a strange connection issue. What you can do is: keep the watch in Gadgetbridge but remove it from paired devices in Android, then re-add again in Gadgetbridge (although it was still there).

We have enabled ongoing notifications for two popular FLOSS sports tracking apps, OpenTracks and FitoTrack. This allows you to observe notifications of an ongoing activity tracked by these apps right on your wrist. Normally, we block ongoing notifications because these could be emitted many times per second and thus cause fast battery drain and also other possible issues. It is therefore recommended to set the Settings → Minimum time between notifications to a few seconds. You can of course always block notifications of these apps completely via the regular Notification blacklist.

Gadgetbridge 0.56: UM25 voltage meter support, Fossil Hybrid HR improvements and more!

Only one week between releases - and again thanks to contributors, still an impressive changelog. We are currently waiting for F-Droid to sign and publish.

HM25 voltage meters

Daniel Dakhno has contributed initial support for HM25 voltage meters. This was a longstanding PR which we almost forgot about, sorry and thanks, Daniel!

Fossil Hybrid HR improvements

Arjan Schrijver has contributed various improvements for Fossil HR specific code, like fixing missing menu headers in Gadgetbridge and disabling feature that cannot be used on later firmware revisions.

Gadgetbridge 0.55. Better InifiTime support, new features for all devices

This is the first in many releases without any new Huami/Xiaomi device supported, but still deserved a version bump from 0.54.x to 0.55.0, as we added multiple new device independent features!

Battery logging

People were wondering how their battery discharges over time, so we started logging it since release 0.54. There was just no finished graph to show the discharge over time. This is now ready for release and part of 0.55.0. Just tap on the battery icon in the main activity (aka "control center") and have a look!

Gadgetbridge releases 0.53.0, 0.54.0 and 0.54.1: Initial support for even more Amazfit devices, Zepp E and Wasp-os

First month of the new year 2021 has delivered tons of new devices. We are happy to see new people stepping up and providing the initial support for these watches:

• Wasp-os - Daniel Thompson
• Amazfit Neo - xaos
• Amazfit GTS 2 Mini - Andreas Shimokawa
• Huami Zepp E - Andrew Watkins
• Amazfit GTR 2e - Jochen S
• Amazfit GTS 2e - Andreas Shimokawa
• Amazfit X - Stefan Bora

Many thanks to all contributors!

While new devices' support is flowing in, this doesn't mean that all features and functions of these newly added devices are working, but the initial support typically already provides many important aspects required for day to day usage. It also offers a very convenient way to look at these devices in more detail and help to improve their support further. These Gadgetbridge releases (0.53.0, 0.54.0 and 0.54.1) also contain many small and big fixes and improvements all over the place :).

Adding battery info screen to Gadgetbridge

This is a short article to document a process of adding a fairly simple feature to Gadgetbridge. This article is intended to newcomers wanting to participate in Gadgetbridge development who do have some understanding of programming in Java for Android (in Android Studio). Written by a fellow novice programmer in the Android Java ecosystem, it hopes to serve as a basic introduction to some of the concepts used in the Gadgetbridge codebase. There is more information in our wiki, like the Developer documentation and if you are looking for an advice how to add a new device support into Gadgetbridge, there is a comprehensive New device tutorial.

Gadgetbridge 0.52.0: Initial support for Amazfit Bip U Pro

Christmas holidays was a good time to relax, recharge and take some time off. After that, commits and pull requests started flowing in with various fixes and improvements. One of the contributions has brought support for another variant of Amazfit watches:

• Amazfit Bip U Pro contributed by DanialHanif - thank you!

Also the Amazfit GTS2, which was previously supported in theory but was practically unusable due to a pairing bug, should now work properly.

For some reason, data in Weather notification sometimes provides incomplete data, which resulted in weather updates not being sent at all to the smart device. This behavior is now handled properly in this Gadgetbridge release.

Gadgetbridge 2020: year in review and numbers

This has been a very busy but good year for Gadgetbridge, with 21 releases since January 2020. It has been the first year after we have migrated to Codeberg. One of the possible concern of the move has been smaller visibility and loss of contributors, but opposite turned out to be true. The visible favorite "star" data is of course lower - the previously reached star numbers on the GitHub hosting went into several thousands (3600 stars), with 200 watchers and 627 forks and current data on Codeberg shows smaller numbers after the first year: 173 stars, 22 watchers and 86 forks, but we did have larger engagement and number of contributors. Big thank you to everybody being involved with Gadgetbridge now or any time before!