Finally on the G6

Not really a celebration, but anyway.

Finally ran out of my G4 sensors, and it was also transmitter battery replacement time.  I found that the transmitters were lasting shorter amounts of time with the last few replacements.  

It took all of a week before I had to hack together a solution so I could get back my predictive bg readings and push the data to my Garmin.  I couldn't see buying an iWatch, the battery life is terrible.  Additionally, I'm underwhelmed by whatever app dexcom would be providing.

I've got this running on a Raspberry Pi that I always have around for Unix things.  It was fairly easy.  I'm using cron to call a python script every minute that connects to share and gets my glucose. 

I then store the value in a mysql database, do my analytics and send a notification to my Garmin if necessary.  I wasn't looking forward to writing another iPhone app, so I found an app called Pushover that handles this perfectly.

I miss my 2 hour snooze function, but I'll live.

The one downside to this, is it won't work when I'm mountain biking in parts of Vermont.  I have to rely on just the phone app when I'm out of network.

Slowly moving to the G6

 Finally Picked up a few G6's.  Still on the G4 until next year, but I had a chance to get an ESP32 to talk to the thing.  So, hopefully, when I finally have to downgrade, I can at least keep the functionality I want.

New device, ESP32 TinyPico, total size 1 3/4 square and about the thickness of a cell phone, perfect.  Battery life was around 17 hours, it's a power hog.  Nice feature is the pico has onboard lipo management ie. charging.

New Gadgets

 

Trying out the Bangle and the Puck.  Both support BLE, so might be able to Pair with a G6.

We will soon find out.  Bangle is really big, also need to see what the battery life is.  The Puck could replace the custom device I carry around, it's slightly smaller, but I'd be burning up Cr2032's.  I could live with 1 a week for the size improvement.  In either case, these would replace a cellphone.

Adding the Amazfit Bip

 

Here's the Amazfit Bip Watch.  Example of the regular watch face and notifications.  The notification is, estimate 100 mg/dl, 80 mg/dl in 12 minutes, falling.

This continues to be a battle to stay ahead of product obsolescence.  My Amazfit Band died after 10 months.  It would no longer charge.  The root problem was most likely that it was no longer waterproof.  The thing basically fell apart in my hand while I was trying to attach the charger.

Potentially tricky using the Amazfit products now.  The new firmware requires a server generated key.  So, you have to activate the watch with your phone, using the MI app.  But don't let the app update your firmware, when it starts to do that, close the app.  Then go to Arduino and do the pairing as you normally(how much of this is normal?) would.  A shame, there's allot of interesting functionality on this watch, but I can't use it.

On deck, I'm messing around with the Ticwatch, which is Wear OS, which used to be Android Wear.  This isn't going well.  Like my previous battle with Android Wear, I can't keep bluetooth up for more that 6 hours, at some point the watch decides it's inactive and shuts everything down.  You can't restart bluetooth without rebooting the watch.  On top of that, ambient mode changed, and the watch is only good for about 11 hours.  It's also clunky and huge.  The cool thing with this project is calibration can be performed on the watch.  Almost back to the functionality I had on the Pebble Round... So close, yet so far.

---10/15/2019 Update----
Way to many features on this watch to not risk letting it update it's firmware.  Did not remove my pairing, so good to go.

---10/19/2019
Continue to be amazed with this watch.  Battery is going to last nearly 2 weeks.  Using the GPS on runs, integrates with Strava.  I'll probably ditch the Vivosmart in the near future, although I do like the Garmin software.  Updated the fonts to Bold, can easily read it now.  Don't think I'll be wasting anymore of my time on Wear OS/Android Wear.  Why deal with a wearable that requires daily charging?

Joys of iPhone Updates

The recent iPhone update really screwed with my iPhone app.  Have to renew my Dev license and see what's up.

App works if I leave it open, and close the phone.  

Sometimes, it appears that is goes to sleep, no glucose readings are evaluated, until I open the phone, then it instantly reconnects and pulls in a value.  Maybe I backgrounded the app in this case.

It's really bad at discovering the bluetooth device now.  It will scan for about a minute and then shut down.  I don't think it will connect at all from the background.

And all of this behavior varies.  Best bet is to keep it wide open, with the screen on, if I need to use it.

Wahoo Elemnt as a CGMS

Or really, any BLE compatible HR Monitor.

Was doing a mountain bike race this weekend, and was once again reminded of how I'd like glucose on a display I could easily see.  The watches, fitness bands etc.  don't show up very well in bright daylight.

This is something I'd wanted to do with ANT+ years ago, but there wasn't any convenient dev board, and I'm not sure if I ever worked out how to appear as a HR Sensor.

This is much easier to do with bluetooth.  Since I'm using the Adafruit NRF Feather, it was easy to lift their sample code for the custom_hrm.  And you see it above.  I can now track my blood sugar from my handlebars, 169 in this case.

9/30/2019 This is good up to 229, then it wraps around and/or doesn't reliably show a number.

Adding the Amazfit Cor

So, I use reading glasses.  The MI Band 2 is hard to see at times.  In the middle of the night and while driving, the notification will go away before I can focus.

According to Gadgetbridge, the Amazfit Cor uses the same "OS" as the MI, so I picked one up.  I can definitely read the display. 

Added bonus, you can go to the notification screen and review the past 10 messages, which is nice since the MI just erases them after 2 seconds.