Blog¶

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.

Gadgetbridge 0.49.0: Lots of improvements - and even more Huami devices supported!

Notes from under the bridge

Gadgetbridge 0.49.0 has been released, closing up yet another interesting period of development.It is already available on F-Droid!

New supported devices

Initial support for few new Huami devices has been added:

• Amazfit Bip S Lite
• Amazfit GTR 2/GTS 2

Thanks to contributors who own these devices and were able test and integrate the required changes into Gadgetbridge. Adding a new without us having access to the physical device can be hard, so any effort is appreciated. To make new developer's lives easier, the New Device Tutorial has been improved a lot, providing good guidance in adding a new device, storing activity data and also providing preference interface and storage.

Gadgetbridge 0.48.0: Three completely new devices supported

Gadgetbridge 0.48.0 has been tagged and will appear on F-Droid soon! As always, this can take a few days.

Six code contributors and twenty one translators have contributed more then 130 commits to the latest release of Gadgetbridge, bringing support for three new devices:

• The Sony SWR12 bands
• Lefun Smart Bands
• Nut

The Nut devices use the Nordic firmware update protocol (DFU) by using the official nordic library. This enabled us to also use it for other devices like the like the PineTime (InfiniTime), and probably more devices in the future. PineTime InfitiTime firmware's music control, being recently improved, also got improved support in Gadgetbridge. All of the work mentioned in this paragraph was contributed by Taavi Eomäe. Thanks Taavie!

Gadgetbridge 0.47.0: Pinetime-JF, big update for Huami devices

Gadgetbridge 0.47.0 has been tagged and will appear on F-Droid soon! As always, this can take a few days.

This release finally has initial support for Pinetime-JF (JF Firmware for the PineTime watch). You can check progress of the JF Firmware here. This initial support is not really usable, it only allows setting the time, displaying PineTime's software and hardware revisions, and seeing notification titles on the watch (without vibration). As the firmware improves, we plan to support new upstream feature as soon as we can.

Gadgetbridge 0.46.0: Mi Band 5 and TLW64 support

Gadgetbridge 0.46.0 has been release and after a whole week of waiting it landed in F-Droid.

This release, which adds TLW64 support contributed by Erik Bloß, also has support for the new Mi Band 5, which is basically runnig on the Mi Band 4 code.

On the Huami front there are fixes for GTR/GTS activity data on newer firmware version. There seems to be extra data which we ignore for now to make the current code run with it. In the future we will look at making use of the new data which unfortunately would need a new database schema.