I’m continuing to refine my Sisyphus-themed Pebble watch face.
In my last blog post, I wrote about reworking the watch face I created for the Rebble hackathon. I wasn’t overly happy about the state of the watch face, and so I put in a little more time.
The main sticking point for me was the background/sky image, which looked like:
The rays of sunshine and multiple suns were interesting, but didn’t end up looking like anything when only part of the image was onscreen. I finally had the idea to use a larger cloud bank in the far background to catch whatever colour the sky is supposed to be. After way too much tweaking of paths, I ended up with:
I ended up using a “hot dog” structure for the layers of clouds, i.e. a long square with a circle on each end. I ended up redoing the bottom of the “foreground” clouds to use this look as well:
Sizzle Reel
One of the difficulties in showing this off is that the animation takes 24 hours. So in this pass, I added a “sizzle reel” mode controlled by a compiler flag.
The key in doing this was finally understanding enough C to dig through the
PebbleOS code
base
and confirm that a time_t structure is just a long unsigned integer. I then
used an online tool to figure out the seconds since the epoch for a suitable
test day.
When we’re in normal mode, we pull the time from the system. When we’re in “sizzle mode”, we start our internal clock at midnight and update the clock manually on each “tick”. Instead of moving to the next second, the time moves forward by 121 seconds each pass. Since the boulder does a full lap every 120 seconds, the “boulder” still appears to make one second’s worth of progress each second, including the “fall” once the boulder clears the top of the mountain.
The sky and clouds move much faster though. You can see a full 24 hours’ worth of movement in a couple of minutes. Thanks to this new mode, I was able to capture a proper demo reel showing how things look over the course of a full day:
Conclusion
I’m much happier with this version, it looks nicer by far, and is pretty readable throughout the day and night. I keep saying I’ll probably start working on other projects now, but keep waking up wanting to improve it. We’ll see.
As always, you can check out the code on GitHub if you’re interested. Stay tuned to see whatever’s next.