KnightsFace for Pebble

I applied to UCF almost as soon as the application window opened. Filled it all out, did my math placement tests, and then got confirmation in November of 2017 that I was admitted. Very excited, I decided to make myself a simple one-day watchface showcasing my school spirit. 

By this point, my Pebble skills were a little rusty. With the announced death of pebble the last year, I had produced one or two simple projects, but nothing like how frequently I was pumping out projects the past year. So, I didn't want to do anything too complicated, but I still wanted to try something new. It'd be a round watchface for my PTR, it'd have some customization, but the new, exciting thing to try was "PDC" assets - "Pebble Draw Command." Basically, vector assets for the Pebble platform. I'd use these to make analog hands for the watchface.

Asset production was relatively quick - I'd played with some of the UCF iconography before, and it was relatively easy to get the assets and crunch them down to the size and color pallete that would be compatable with Pebble.

The only real challenge came from the fancy PDC features - while there was technically a script to convert from an svg vector file to a pdc vector file, I never got it working. Instead, the best bet I had found was a tool called PDC.js, created by Johannes Neubrand. From here, I tried a few different things, but eventually settling on some golden swords I liked. Exporting these was easy with the tool, which would download a .pdc file.

Drawing a PDC file in the watchface was a little more complicated than just dumping a picture on it - adding in the calculations for rotating the swords like the hands of a clock, and it was a little messy. But it worked!

As with my previous projects before, the configuration page was done using Clay, and offered standard options - what logo you wanted, digital/analog options, a buzz on disconnect, battery display, etc.

A little bit of asset creation for the appstore later, I had my final product (shown as a gif, displaying all the different icons possible):

The analog swords turned out... okay. I ended up staying on the digital display for the most part, only turning on analog for personal use when showing off.

You can find the app availabe on the pebble store here: https://apps.rebble.io/en_US/application/5a183f5a0dfc323bd000344e?hardware=chalk

And you can find the source here: thomasstoeckert/KnightsFace: A chalk watchface centered around UCF (github.com)