Garmin Swatch Time

A minimalist, elegant, nerdy, typography-focused Garmin Connect IQ watch face that displays the current time as Swatch time.

Available for installation from Garmin Connect IQ Developer portal or through the Connect IQ mobile app.

Note
Swatch Time is part of a collection of unconventional Garmin watch faces. It has been developed for fun, as a proof of concept, and as a learning experience. It is shared as is as an open source project, with no commitment to long term maintenance and further feature development.

Please use issues to provide bug reports or feature requests.
Please use discussions for any other comments.

All feedback is wholeheartedly welcome.

Contents

• Swatch time
• Features
• Fonts
• Build, test, deploy

Swatch time

In Swatch Time (also known as Swatch internet time), "the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 equal parts called .beats, meaning each .beat lasts 86.4 seconds (1.440 minutes) in standard time, and an hour lasts for approximately 42 .beats. The time of day always references the amount of time that has passed since midnight (standard time) in Biel, Switzerland."

The Garmin Swatch Time watch face displays the time as beats, three-digit numbers from 000 to 999. Optionally, standard time and beatseconds (one beatsecond is defined here to be 1/000 of a beat) may be enabled. The user may also choose between two symbols for the Swatch Time: The commonly used @ (at) or the arguably better looking . (dot)

Note
The time is specific to the fixed location of Biel, Switerland. Thus the value .500 means noon Biel time, not local time at the current device location.

Features

The Swatch Time watch face supports the following features:

Screenshot	Description
	Swatch time beats By default, the watch face shows a red dot, followed by three white digits showing the Swatch time beats (remember, it's time in Biel, Switzerland).
	Standard time A setting in the Customize menu enables the user to toggle the standard time display on and off. The standard time is shown below the Swatch time in smaller, dimmer font.
	Swatch time symbol By default, the Swatch time beats are preceded with a dot. A setting in the Customize menu allows the user to toggle between the dot and the at (@) symbol.
	Beatseconds By default, Swatch time is shown as three-digit beats. A setting in the Cutomize menu allows the user to toggle the display of beatseconds on an off.

Fonts

The Swatch Time watch face uses custom fonts:

• Ubuntu for the Swatch time symbol (bols), beats (bold), beatseconds (regular), and standard time (regular).

The development of Garmin watch faces motivated the implementation of two useful tools:

• A TTF to FNT+PNG converter (ttf2bmp).
  Garmin watches use non-scalable fixed-size bitmap fonts, and cannot handle variable size True Type fonts directly.
• An font scaler automation tool (garmin-font-scaler).
  Garmin watches come in a variety of shapes and resolutions, and bitmap fonts need to be scaled for each device proportionally to its resolution.

Note
To not appear disproportionately big, the At (@) symbol is drawn in a slightly smaller font than the Swatch time itself.

The font development proceeded as follows:

• The fonts were downloaded from Google Fonts as True Type (.ttf) fonts.
• The fonts were converted to bitmaps as .fnt and .png pairs using the open source command-line ttf2bmp converter.
• The font sizes were established to match the Garmin Fenix 7X Solar watch 280x280 pixel screen resolution.
• The fonts were then scaled proportionally to match other screen sizes available on Garmin watches using the garmin-font-scaler tool.

The table below lists all font sizes provided for the supported screen resolutions.

Resolution	Shape	Element	Font	Size
148 x 205	rectangle	At	Ubuntu bold	32
148 x 205	rectangle	Beats	Ubuntu bold	42
148 x 205	rectangle	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	32
148 x 205	rectangle	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	16
176 x 176	semi-octagon	At	Ubuntu bold	38
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Beats	Ubuntu bold	50
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	38
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	19
215 x 180	semi-round	At	Ubuntu bold	39
215 x 180	semi-round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	51
215 x 180	semi-round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	39
215 x 180	semi-round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	19
218 x 218	round	At	Ubuntu bold	47
218 x 218	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	62
218 x 218	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	47
218 x 218	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	23
240 x 240	round	At	Ubuntu bold	51
240 x 240	rectangle	At	Ubuntu bold	51
240 x 240	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	69
240 x 240	rectangle	Beats	Ubuntu bold	69
240 x 240	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	51
240 x 240	rectangle	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	51
240 x 240	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	26
240 x 240	rectangle	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	26
260 x 260	round	At	Ubuntu bold	56
260 x 260	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	74
260 x 260	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	56
260 x 260	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	28
280 x 280	round	At	Ubuntu bold	60
280 x 280	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	80
280 x 280	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	60
280 x 280	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	30
320 x 360	rectangle	At	Ubuntu bold	69
320 x 360	rectangle	Beats	Ubuntu bold	91
320 x 360	rectangle	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	69
320 x 360	rectangle	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	34
360 x 360	round	At	Ubuntu bold	77
360 x 360	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	103
360 x 360	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	77
360 x 360	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	39
390 x 390	round	At	Ubuntu bold	84
390 x 390	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	111
390 x 390	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	84
390 x 390	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	42
416 x 416	round	At	Ubuntu bold	89
416 x 416	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	119
416 x 416	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	89
416 x 416	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	45
454 x 454	round	At	Ubuntu bold	97
454 x 454	round	Beats	Ubuntu bold	130
454 x 454	round	Beatseconds	Ubuntu regular	97
454 x 454	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	49

Build, test, deploy

To modify and build the sources, you need to have installed:

• Visual Studio Code with Monkey C extension.
• Garmin Connect IQ SDK.

Consult Monkey C Visual Studio Code Extension for how to execute commands such as build and test to the Monkey C runtime.

You can use the included Makefile to conveniently trigger some of the actions from the command line.

# build binaries from sources
make build

# run unit tests -- note: requires the simulator to be running
make test

# run the simulation 
make run

# clean up the project directory
make clean

To sideload your application to your Garmin watch, see developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/connect-iq-basics/your-first-app.