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.

Improvements for Fossil Hybrid HR and InfiniTime

Thanks to contributor Daniel Dakhnod, the Fossil HR, among a lot of other small improvements, now supports rejecting calls on the latest firmware again (up tp DN1.0.2.19).

For PineTime(InfiniTime), Gadgetbridge 0.49.0 now also supports the latest 0.9.0 firmware.

Sortable menu items

One of the most requested feature has been the ability to sort menu items on the bracelet. For the longest, Gadgetbridge was able to enable/disable menu items, but did not provide sorting. The issue was not in the underlying device support, but rather in Android widget library, which does not really have any sortable list of items that can be toggled on/off and at the same time acted as a source of data for the Android's Preferences Settings model. After several research sessions, a suitable library was adopted. It is now very simple for Gadgetbridge developers to use this sortable list in device settings and by turn end users now have the ability to enjoy enabling and sorting menu items and shortcuts on all Huami devices (except Mi Band 2).

Activity views and charts

The Sports Activity detail view got a simple GPS track drawing, together with the ability to take a screenshot of the full page of this activity. Not only it is nice to be able to share the complete screen with detailed activity data, chart of activity and heart rate plus the GPS view, but at the same time, Android top bar menu icons are not included, adding slightly more privacy to the shared image.

Sports Activities are parts of the day that are explicitly recorded by the user, but many times, this recording is an extra effort. To be able to overcome this limitation, a new Activity List has been added to Gadgetbridge Charts . Under the hood it goes through the recorded data and searches for active periods from your day. Parameters for how these sessions are determined can be adjusted in Charts → Preferences → Activity list. Today, we are pushing out a dashboard view for each day, which is calculating a summary of all active parts of the day and also comparing it to your goals. These goals have been in the menu: Settings → About you for a very long time but have been used only occasionally throughout Gadgetbridge. It is always good to set these values, because some bands require them for their internal calculations. The Activity List makes use of data in this settings to draw charts of your active steps, active time and distance, compared to your daily goals. So make sure to adjust them.

Intensity of activity

One of the new items in Activity List but also in the Sleep charts is intensity. It is an interesting value which typically does not surface as a number, but in fact it has been used throughout Gadgetbridge charts a lot: the green spikes on axis Y in activity charts? Intensity. The light and dark blue spikes on axis Y in your sleep charts? Also intensity. It is a value (normalized to a decimal between 0 and 1) that is representing a strength or an intensity of your activity, as determined by the bracelet. At night, the more you move, the higher this intensity is. During an activity or walk, the more your arm moves, the number seems to go up. So it seems good to expose this number even more, to be able to observe it, typically labeling it as Movement intensity. The displayed result is not calculated as an average but rather as a total sum of the intensity of a particular activity in activity list or in your sleep. Hopefully you'll find it useful.

For all user-facing changes since the previous blog post, check the following list:

0.49.0

  • Initial support for Amazfit Bip S Lite
  • Initial support for Amazfit GTR/GTS 2
  • Huami: allow sorting of shortcuts and menus (all except Mi Band 2)
  • Amazfit Band 5: Allow enabling SpO2 menu
  • Mi/Amazfit Band 5: Support shortcuts (right/left swipe)
  • Amazfit GTS: Fix firmware flashing on Firmware >=0.1.1.16
  • Amazfit GTR: Fix firmware flashing on Firmware >=1.3.7.16 or >=1.7.0.10
  • Amazfit GTR/GTS: Add missing settings menu item in preferences
  • Fossil Hybrid HR: Remove Android notifications when deleting them from the watch
  • Fossil Hybrid HR: Enable rejecting calls on newer firmwares
  • Fossil Hybrid HR: Support hands calibration
  • Fossil Hybrid HR: Support factory reset
  • InfiniTime: Improve notification support for firmware >=0.9
  • Add version to About screen
  • Show GPS track in Sport Activity detail screen
  • Add Activity List Dashboard/Summary view to charts
  • Add heart rate average to Activity and Sleep charts
  • Add intensity to Sleep charts
  • Recognize Wire messenger as a chat application
  • Add confirmation dialog for find device button