Fun curiosity, but frustrating in practice
For LILYGO® TTGO T-Watch-2020
Messing around with the T-Watch 2020 over a long weekend, I come away from it somewhat impressed but my experience with it has been frustrating enough that I can't recommend it without some revisions. First of all right out of the box, the power button didn't work at all. I took the thing apart and the switch just falls out, wasn't soldered to the board. I'm sure that's not a widespread problem and it was easy enough to solder it back on, but not a great first impression.
Second, some ESP32 boards can be temperamental about flashing them, but this thing is ridiculous. I've spent hours staring at esptool watching it try and fail to flash until you get lucky enough for it to hit the bootloader. If you tear into it, pressing the flimsy little membrane reset button underneath the speaker can more reliably get you there, but pressing it all weekend I already feel it getting flimsier, don't see it surviving many more presses. If there's a revision of this thing I'd like to see gpio0 brought out to an accessible flash button, or at least to a pad somewhere that can be shorted. To anyone out there that buys this thing, I highly advise using the ESP32's OTA mechanism and writing your own updater rather than relying on the bootloader.
The positives: the design of the thing is pretty nice actually, its not a bad looking cheapo smartwatch. Backlight is fairly bright and you can see the screen just fine in daylight. The TTGO Arduino library gives you everything you need to get up and running pretty quickly. Not much help if you aren't using the Arduino environment, but you can glean enough out of the documentation to get you going in whatever else you want to use. Once you manage to actually get something flashed to it, there's a pretty interesting environment to mess around with here, with some frustrations.
Response from Lilygo | Aug. 4, 2020
Hello there. Thank you for your feedback, , we have submitted your question to our production department, which will help us to avoid the same problem from appearing on other customers in the next production .
Could you contact us by message and tell us your order number ? Our after-sales colleagues will contact you to solve the problem for you .
Regarding the problem of uploading program failure, we already have automatic download in the circuit design Circuit, we will also collect your question to our hardware engineer.
