Blog¶

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!

Gadgetbridge 0.51.0: Amazfit Bip U, Amazfit Verge Lite

We do not know why Huami releases so many new devices every year. These have become too much to buy all of them, but it is always nice to have pull requests from the community, which happened for the Bip U and Verge Lite during this cycle. Thank you!

But there is a lot more to this release!

Apart from the usual bug fixes and tweaks, we overhauled the daily stats widget completely which is now much better looking and more functional.

Also device code contributors have pushed improvements, most notably the Casio GBX-100 and Bangle.js which now support activity data recording.

On building safe bridges

Cool gadgets give us some really great possibilities, like tracking our activities, controlling music and smart home devices, receiving notifications and more. But in our strive for better, faster, lighter, smarter, cheaper... we often forget the down side of our endeavors. Apps providing connections to our devices do receive all our movement information, including precise location. We have written about it previously, in 2017. But maybe you do not care about the details of your whereabouts being shared and only care about your communication. And your communication with friends and family is surely safe with secure apps that have become widely popular, right? But unfortunately, every notification that is forwarded to your smart bracelet even though you received it from some very secure, end to end encrypted app like Matrix or Signal, has been seen by the bracelet's companion app. These are closed source applications provided mostly by the vendor of the gadget and it is only up to the vendor to decide if they send these conversations to their servers for further processing. It is now up to us to decide if we want to give them fully detailed view into our lives.

Gadgetbridge 0.50.0: Initial support for Casio GBX-100

This release comes just two weeks after the previous version bump, but brings a support for a new device:

• Casio GBX-100 contributed by Andreas Böhler.

Another important new feature in this release is support for flashing watchfaces for the Amazfit/Mi Band 5. These devices support up to three custom watch faces plus two factory ones. Even though it looks easy then you know how, it took a lot of time and effort to analyze and implement this correctly.

On the user interface side, the Sports Activities got their Dashboard view revamped to better match the design of the recently added Activity List Dashboard. And, utilizing all the work done on our new sortable type of preference widget, the Charts Tabs can now be selectively enabled/disabled and also arranged as preferred by each user, independently for each device.