Ti Chronos Watch Controls Raspberry Pi

[Mike Field] was working on interfacing his TI Chronos eZ430 watch with the Raspberry Pi. As things were going pretty well, he took a side-trip from his intended hack and implemented watch-based control for an RPi audio player.

It really comes as no surprise that this is possible, and even easy. After all, the RPi board has native USB capability for hosting the watch‘s RF dongle, and it’s running Linux which we know already works well with the Chronos platform. But we still love the thought of having automation controls strapped to our wrist!

mpg321 is the audio playback program used for this hack. It plays MP3 files using ALSA for sound, which does have a few hiccups on the RPi. [Mike] found workarounds and included them in the C program he uses to gather everything into one nice code package. Control depends on keypresses sent from the watch (meant for use with PowerPoint) which are translated by his code and pushed to the audio/mp3 programs.

9 thoughts on “Ti Chronos Watch Controls Raspberry Pi

  1. Nice, I was just thinking of seeing of the Access Pointed worked in the RPi. I just got a CommandIR working so this will be a nice addition to home automation. Click my name for my blog, I should be posting about it soon.

  2. I have been using the same battery in mine for a year now, and the voltage is still high. Maybe the software you are using isn’t using low power modes? I have been using OpenChronos, compiled on Linux, with great success.

    1. First sign your battery is getting low is you not being able to flash the chronos via RF, when enabling RF the voltage drops and the brownout detection kicks in resetting the clock. My battery lasted more than a year, with regular clock usage + casual random flashing by RF for development.

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