The watch these apps are made for

The UNA Watch

A round, button-driven watch with GPS, a barometer, a compass and an optical heart-rate sensor, on a platform that is open from its software to its circuit boards.

FossIsTheWay
UNA's mockups of the watch in charcoal, teal and white, wearing DialDeck, Zone Clock and Tide Clock
UNA's mockups of the watch in charcoal, teal and white, wearing DialDeck, Zone Clock and Tide Clock
38sensor types in UNA's SDK
6circuit boards, their design files published
4kinds of app: activities, utilities, glances, faces
100motion samples a second, measured

The four kinds of app, and how to tell a utility from a watch face: which kind of app?

What makes it worth a look

Open down to the circuit boards

UNA publishes its software kit under the MIT licence, and the design files for all six of the watch's boards, schematics and parts lists included, with the case's 3D files, under CC BY 4.0: in UNA's words, "enabling users to debug their own hardware."

Real sensors on the wrist

GPS from an Airoha AG3335M receiver, a barometric altimeter, a magnetometer for a compass, an optical heart-rate sensor, and motion sensors an app can read a hundred times a second.

Apps that run as native code

Apps are C++ running directly on the watch's ARM chip, each a background service with a screen of its own: an alarm rings with its app closed, a track records with the screen dark.

Made to be built for

Free tools on Linux, macOS or Windows, a simulator, TouchGFX or LVGL for the screen, unit tests on the computer, a Figma kit, and fourteen example apps and nine tutorials in UNA's documentation.

A round screen and four buttons

A round 240 by 240 colour display, driven by four buttons rather than touch: up, down, select and back.

Your data, as files

Plugged into a computer it is a drive: an app installs by copying a file, and what apps record, a GPS track for one, copies off the same way. Apps are set up from the phone.

What we have measured

  • The display is reflective and always on, and reads in daylight without its light.
  • 31 of the 38 sensor types delivering data on firmware 1.5.0-rc4, swept with SensorView.
  • Motion at 94 to 102 samples a second against the 100 asked for.
  • Heart rate matching a finger-worn optical reader at 61 bpm, side by side.
  • GPS at about 9% of the battery an hour with a fix every second: roughly ten hours of tracking from full.
  • A new app reviewed and approved by UNA within about ten hours of submission.

FossIsTheWay's own measurements on its own watch, with its own apps; the rest of this page is from UNA's documentation, its SDK and its hardware repository.

Where to find more

Worth knowing: it has no touchscreen, by design, and its SpO2 and ECG sensor types have no drivers yet. UNA has not published a battery-life figure, so this page gives none.

Some of what it runs

Alarm It, the next alarm
Alarm It, the next alarm
GPS, where you are
GPS, where you are
Stargazer, tonight's sky
Stargazer, tonight's sky

FossIsTheWay is independent of UNA, and this is not an official UNA page. The watch around the pictures is UNA's mockup, from the UI Resource Pack UNA publishes for apps made for the watch.

The apps for it