Tiny Simpsons smartwatch TV Gadget

Oct 29, 2023
• PlatformAndroid
• LanguageKotlin
• GitHubskyostil/simpdory

A tiny little TV that plays episodes of The Simpsons. This project is based on the excellent original by Brandon Withrow. The main difference is that instead of a Raspberry Pi Zero, the guts of this TV comprise an LG G Watch smartwatch. This watch was released in 2014 and it runs Android 6.

Demo video:

Video playback is achieved with a custom watchface app. When the screen is tapped, the app plays a single randomly chosen video to the end and then goes to sleep.

As you might imagine, a smartwatch from 2014 doesn’t have a whole lot of CPU headroom for video playback, so we need to take some steps to get a reasonable framerate.

First, all videos are transcoded to vp9 at a 280x210 resolution and rotated to match the screen size and orientation (see tools/encode_two_pass.sh). We then use the ExoPlayer library to decode video directly to the watchface surface to make use of hardware acceleration.

While the device itself doesn’t have a speaker, the watch can stream audio to a nearby Bluetooth speaker.

Main parts of the repository:

• app/: Watchface source code (Kotlin). Use ./gradlew installRelease to build and install it on the watch.
• tools/: Scripts for encoding video files. Use adb push video.webm /sdcard/Movies to place the resulting video to the watch.
• simptv.blend: 3D model, mainly just scaled down from the original by buba447 (Licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution license).

Downloads

• Source code · https://github.com/skyostil/simpdory