Fun with the Timex Datalink

Disclaimer:

I am not associated with Timex in any way, OTHER than wanting to use their datalink watch on a civilized OS (read: Unix). All this info has been discovered by watching the behavior of the freely available software found on the Timex WWW site. No disassembly of the Windows software was done.

This is also a work in progress. (Read: Its a mess)

I can not honestly recommend buying one of these watches. Timex has responded to every question I have sent them, which is impressive for a company. However, Timex failed to answer every single one of my questions, all they had to say was "we have no plans at this time to make that information available" (paraphrased).

The single bit of useful information I have received from Timex is that the DataLink watch is based on a Motorola 6805 microcontroler. This was mentioned in passing, and in my opinion by accident.

Motorola, on the other hand, has the complete text of their technical reference manuals on WWW, free for the downloading. They also distribute sample assembly, assemblers, and just about anything else you would ever want to know about their products.

When Timex's behavior is changed to be more like that demonstrated by Motorola and HP, then I will consider recommending their product. I have an HP scanner. I asked HP for a manual. They asked "whats your address?". No proprietary junk, no non-disclosure, it was even free. I recommend exclusively HP scanners and printers to my clients. I am also the proud owner of a fully documented HP48 calculator.

What this is:

This is part of an ongoing effort by several people to, communicate with a Timex DataLink watch, write our own melodies, and write our own "wristapps". Due to lack of information and no cooperation from Timex, we have been forced to reverse-engineer everything. But then again, its been kind of fun too... :-)

Also, since Timex does not support FreeBSD, Linux (or any other unix), there is no other way to use the watch to its advertised capacities.

tjohnson@csgrad.cs.vt.edu

if you would like to join us... (not that we have much of an organization.)

There is a counter on the datalink watch library on Karl's page, if you wish to be counted as a supporter of this project.

Documentation:

I also have a file which when assembled by the assembler below produces the sound tester "wristapp". I am not distributing it freely for copyright reasons (it is directly based on timex's file). Email if you want a copy, AND already have a copy of timex's stuff.

Software:

This is pretty much all C source code. It compiles out of the box under Unix, and should be a simple port to most other OS's. If you do a port, please email back your changes and we can merge them into the "official" version.

Karl's watch page has a complete library for talking to a datalink watch, and information on the model 150 watch protocol.
uart.tgz uart.zip software which tries to decode datalink data.
datalink.ps Extra cheesy serial port datalink interface. (I run X, the crt blink method is a bit difficult...)
serblink.c Program to drive the above hardware. (intended to talk to Karl's library, and included in it.)
disassem.tgz disassem.zip a crude 6805 disassembler, and timex character set dump program.
assembler.tgz assembler.zip A simple 6805 assembler, which supports timex's character set. THIS IS BROKEN... the fixed version will be hopefully be up around 3-30-96.

uart only comprehends linear samples at 44.1Khz, I've been using sox to convert the au files to voc. This program was written as a test-bed, so its pretty horrible. C is self-documenting right? :-)

Timex and Timex DataLink are registered trademarks of the Timex Corp.
MS-Windows is a trademark of Microsoft.
Motorola is a trademark of the Motorola corporation