Watchface: SolarDay, a 24-hour sun clock for Garmin solar watches

SolarDay is a watch face for Garmin's solar watches. It shows when your watch was charging, right on the dial.

- A 24-hour ring with noon at the top. The sun moves around it and leaves a trail. The trail's width and color show how much light your panel caught in each 15 minutes. It stays until midnight.
- A gray track from sunrise to sunset, with blue marks for civil dawn and dusk. At night the moon shows its real phase.
- Along the bottom: a gauge for any data field with a goal, the days of the week, your week of sun (7 days of solar charging as bars), or the current zodiac constellation drawn from its real stars. The constellation can replace the gauge at sunset.
- Sun bonus today: the extra battery time the day's sun added, measured on the watch from its own battery readings. It shows nothing until the result is statistically solid.
- LCD-style digits drawn as polygons, upright or slanted. 56 data fields for six spots, three field sizes, 8 accent colors, 7 ring palettes, 10 looks, 7 languages.
- Settings on the watch (Watch Face, SolarDay, Customize) as well as on the phone. Touch a data field to open its app.
- One solar reading a minute while on screen, one every five minutes in the background. No GPS and no Communications permission.

Every release is tested on every supported watch in the simulator, including long runs across midnight and a watchdog test on the slowest watch. If you hit a problem, tell me here and I will look at it.

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/4dfc07bf-4ade-4ea8-8830-4e53c23c1919

Also free, from the same bench: Solar Harvest, a data field for the same watches. During an activity it shows real battery gain and drain from your own watch, a live sun compass, and how well you are catching the light, and it writes fourteen developer fields into Garmin Connect for charts afterward. Open source.

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/b0d0fd86-bc11-4d9a-9f78-40db5c7b7fa0

texasbe2trill 5 days ago

Quick update: SolarDay 1.2.4 is out, and it's all about the night sky.

The night sky is now a little planetarium:

- Stars in their real colors. Spica is blue-white, Aldebaran is amber, Antares is red.
- The Milky Way where it actually runs. Wait until Scorpius and Sagittarius. It gets thick.
- The faint stars you'd see from a dark site, plus the Pleiades and the Beehive
- A dotted line for the sun's path, and the constellation's name
- Figures about three times bigger, tilted the way they stand in the evening sky
- On the dark background, the brightest star in Taurus, Gemini, Leo, Virgo and Scorpius twinkles when you raise your wrist

The first night after you update, give it a few seconds while you're looking at it. The constellation shows up right away and the Milky Way fills in behind it. After that it's just there every night.

fenix 6 Pro owners: you get the new figures and colors. The Milky Way didn't fit in the memory those watches have, sorry!

If the face doesn't load or looks off after the update, reinstall it from the Connect IQ app and you should be good.

Free update if you already have it: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/4dfc07bf-4ade-4ea8-8830-4e53c23c1919

Right now it's Libra. Scorpius starts October 23 and that's the one I'm most excited about. If you try it, I'd love to see a photo of your sky at night.