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We received funding!

· 3 min read
Jakob Krantz
Jakob Krantz
Senior Software Engineer and ZSWatch Creator and Maintainer

For the last few months there have not been much progress in ZSWatch. But that's about to change because we have received 50 000 € from the NLnet Foundation to take ZSWatch to the next level!

NGI0 Commons Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.

We support organisations and people who contribute to an open internet for all. We fund projects that help fix the internet through open hardware, open software, open standards, open science and open data.

Which ZSWatch falls pretty well under.

Here we go into more details about what this means.

How the funding will be used​

The funding will allow me to work 50% and Daniel to work 20% on ZSWatch. The rest of the money will go to hardware and hardware prototyping costs. The funded project will run for 1 year.

The goal is to both rework and improve ZSWatch. Mainly to make it more accessible to a broader audience and grow the community. This will be done by making it cheaper, easier to assemble and use more accessible parts. Right now getting all parts and assembling a ZSWatch is not super easy, this we aim to change!

Our goal is within one year have a robust watch that is easy to assembly that you can easily get your hands on!

High level plan​

There are so much more details defined, but including that would make this post very long. So here is the high level tasks we aim to finish.

Goals
  • Support daughter board interface attached to the main PCB.
    • This allows to keep core ZSWatch chaper.
    • Allows expandability.
    • Expand with any feature you need.
      • Health tracking (this we will do).
      • Additional sensors.
      • A GPS maybe?
      • Go crazy and add cellular maybe?
      • Unlimited possibilities.
  • New daughter board for health tracking.
  • New main board.
    • Cheaper.
    • Optimize physical layout for improved mechanical assembly.
    • Changes to accomodate daughter boards.
  • Change of components on ZSWatch.
  • New simpler dock.
  • Case redesign.
  • Production test software.
  • Documentation using Docusaurus.
    • You are reading on it now!
    • We will host the blog and all documentation.
  • Improve software usability.
  • Lightwight app store.
    • We want to investigate Zephyr LLEXT to see if it's feasable to dynamically load applications to ZSWatch.
  • Testing.
    • We need more automated tests to easy catch regressions.
  • Phone integration improvements.

Also we are looking for feedback, see the Feedback Blog Post

We will post updates of our progress so don't forget to sign up for our email list!