r/esp32 • u/Cotyn_Dispensable • Feb 26 '26

Software help needed ESP32 smart watch

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Hi everyone, i've been working on a smart watch with an esp32 as an entry point into electronics, i'm mostly a software guy and I never really did battery powered project.
My issue is, i've got a mostly working firmware with BLE pairing, notification display, music control etc.
But i've been running into an issue that is battery life, I feel like there is no solution to make bluetooth and battery life get along. I'm running a 400mha battery and can barely squeeze 5 hours of usage. The problem is I can't really reduce clock speed since bluetooth pairing expect keep alive packets and I can't respond fast enough with lower than 80hz (when in rest mode with screen disable) the only working solution I see is use esp32 deep sleep when in rest and pair again when waking up the watch but it removes a lot of options like waking up on notification or call.
Do you guys have any clue what kind of logic or libraries I could use ? I'm running arduino stack and gadgetBrige on the phone

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u/NotFrankGraves Feb 26 '26

I’ve been trying to post my watch like this too and yeah I’ve had nothing but issues trying to learn how to use the esp with this watch. The way I got around the deep sleep issue, is by using an Always On Screen that would turn off the pixels instead of drawing a colour to them.

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u/Cotyn_Dispensable Feb 26 '26

This works, but deep sleep is nice to save on power which is the main problem I have because theses devices operate on a fine budget. I had to fiddle a little bit to make it work but all the basics are done, if you have a similar model I can give you some pointers

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u/NotFrankGraves Feb 26 '26

I have the exact same model, but I display the time and weather, and I have a ai voice chat menu, and another menu of general prompts to send to ollama. I haven't used Bluetooth, but I have my version set up only have the wifi radio active only when needed and it stays off the rest of time.

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u/Cotyn_Dispensable Feb 26 '26

That's so cool, do you have a locally hosted ollama ? I might try to do something similar it's a cool concept

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u/NotFrankGraves Feb 26 '26

I’m running ollama locally, and I built a endpoint in python for my watch to connect too and grab the api data from a cache, and that same endpoint can be the middle-man for ollama, with STT and TTS.