Starfield Collectors Edition watch runs Espruino

Starfield is the most recent game from Bethesda Game Studios (known for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series). It is a futuristic space exploration RPG that has received a fair deal of press coverage.

As part of the collectors edition of the game, Bethesda worked with The Wand Company to produce a replica of the watch your character receives at the very beginning of the game. The watch and collectors edition are shown in this video at the timestamp.

I bought the collectors edition as I was rather excited for the game and was curious as to what the watch was running. I actually discovered Espruino by watching the firmware update process of the watch. I even bought a Bangle.JS 2 so I could play with Espruino more.

When connected to the IDE, there is no prompt and typed characters are not echoed but commands are still executed.

Here is the output of print(process.env)

{
  "VERSION": "2v18.2174",
  "GIT_COMMIT": "f50bb7b20",
  "BOARD": "DICKENS",
  "RAM": 262144, "FLASH": 1048576, "SPIFLASH": 8388608, "STORAGE": 327680,
  "SERIAL": "xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx",
  "CONSOLE": "Bluetooth",
  "MODULES": "Flash,Storage,heatshrink,locale",
  "EXPTR": 566328, "APP_RAM_BASE": 536882880
}

I rather like the watch hardware, 4 buttons and a circular 240x240 screen with 16-bit color. Accelerometer, magnetometer, temperature, pressure sensors and a vibration motor just like the Bangle, although no GPS or touchscreen. It also has 2 (not 4) pogo pins on the back for charging. I am unsure if it a completely custom board or if it is repurposed with a custom shell.

FCC Registration

If anyone has any suggestions I would be glad to run commands on it to learn about its hardware, as well as back up as much of the original firmware and files as I can. But I would prefer not to modify any of the storage to keep it as close to original as possible.

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Oh, so that's the mystery watch we have in Espruino tree already for 2 years!

https://github.com/espruino/Espruino/blo­b/master/boards/DICKENS.py

Thanks for the FCC ID link, there is also user manual there describing some features of the watch.

Some people in comments there don't like the watch (no hr sensor :-), let's hope it will be available on ebay.

EDIT: many of them are already available but so far for pretty insane prices https://www.ebay.com/itm/266401866971

Yes unfortunately this specific watch is a collectors item.

But I still can't tell if the "DICKENS" board was custom-made by The Wand Company for this collectors edition or no. It is attributed to them in the FCC listing which makes me think is is but I'm not 100% sure how these things work.

I don't know but I just guess that it is custom made in a sense that they decided how the watch should look and then contracted some smartwatch manufacturer to make it. I am guessing mainly because it does not have HR sensor nor touchscreen and has so many buttons, it looks like watch you can operate in space suit :-)

BTW, there is a marking on PCB so someone called RICHTECHIE designed this RT-H120D board , googled and found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVwuRLb­FrI

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Very interesting! I don't know how I completely missed that writing. The initial announcement for Starfield was some time in 2018, so it's likely this board was made specifically for this device.

Hi! Great news you managed to find out it's based on Espruino! I've been working with the Wand company on the watch firmware - but unfortunately Bethesda have been very keen on keeping things secret so I haven't been able to say anything so far.

The firmware is based on DICKENS.py however it's a bit out of date - we have a private branch with some changes on that aren't public, so you wouldn't be able to build exactly the same firmware. I would strongly advise against trying to run anything built from the Espruino repo on the Chronomark watch at the moment.

I'll see about getting some more of that pulled back into the public domain, but the watch uses some font bitmaps that we may not legality be allowed to distribute for free, so there may not ever be a 100% full source available.

I should add though that the Wand Company have been awesome here at supporting Espruino as an Open Source project, and many of the features Bangle.js users are enjoying (ANCS, AMS, UTF8, soon Pebble-style fonts) exist because they were willing to pay for their development.

As far as I'm aware the watch PCB was based on another watch initially, but has had some modifications for the Wand company.

There's no response from the firmware because echo is set to off by the boot code. If you do echo(1) it'll turn back on, or configure the settings with:
require('Storage').writeJSON('setting.js­on', Object.assign(require('Storage').readJSO­N('setting.json',1)||{},{log:0,echo:1}))­ so it's always on.

While the watch itself runs code specifically to make it look like it's from Starfield, there is the possibility of running other 'apps' on it if they were made in the right way, and potentially with a bit of tweaking even some of the stuff from https://banglejs.com/apps/ might work on it