Facade

A dual world time zone analog watch face for most Garmin watches.

• Analog face with second hand
• Second timezone selectable from 327 countries/cities
• Day of week and day month
• Metrics can be shown in each of the 4 corners (ignoring the fact that this is a round watch face with no corners)
• Battery charge indication
• Heart rate
• Total daily step count
• Phase of the moon
• Calories expended
• Distance traveled
• Meters ascended
• Active minutes
• Rrespiration rate
• Current temperature

Note the red or green triangle on the outer edge of the dial. This triangle marks the hour hand position for the second time zone (or the first time zone if there is no second timezone selected). This triangle will be red to indicate AM and green to indicate PM. For example, the clock face on the left shows the local time of 10:10AM, the clock face in the middle shows the local time of 10:10PM, and the clock face on the right shows the local time of 11:33AM when it's 5:33PM in Central European Time.

The main timzone is always the analog clock in the center of the display with hour, minute, and second hands. If a second timezone is selected then the hour of that timezone is shown by the triangle on the edge of the face. If the second timezone is not Local then the 3-5 letter abbreviation for that timezone is shown at the bottom of the watch face. Note how the triangle on the outer edge tracks the minutes that have elapsed between the two hour markers. This is important for timezones that don't have a 0 minute offset as you can read the time in the second timezone just from the triangle marker (if the second timezone has a 0 minute offset the the analog minute hand is correct for that timezone).

Daylight Savings Time (DST) is automatically detected for USA/CANADA/EU. The indicated time will be moved forward during DST and the timezone abbreviation displayed with be the one for DST. For other timezones there is a setting that can be set (using Connect IQ or Garmin Express, this is no available on the watch itself as it would make the watch settings too The Main DST and Second DST settings can be set to one of 3 different values:

• Auto - Automatic detection. Works for USA/CANADA/EU, all others will always display standard time.
• Off - This timezone will only display standard time.
• On - This timezone will only display DST time.

Timezones can be selected from one of 327 countries.

The user can select which metric to display in the 4 different corners of the watch face.

You can obtain this watchface from the Connect IQ store. or by going to this direct link.

Facade is licensed under the GPL V3.0. The latest source tree is available for browsing here and tarballs for the latest and older versions are located at the following links:

• Latest version
• Version 3.90 - add configurable metrics
• Version 2.9 - works on slower devices, e.g. Forerunner 55
• Version 2.5 - added automatic DST detection
• Version 2.1 - first releasable version
• Beta 1.10 - first beta

Configuration

• press and hold the back button
• tap on Watch Face
• tap on the pencil icon below the Facade watch face image
• finally tap on Settings

Metrics

•  Battery percentage. Shows the current battery level as a percentage of the maximum charge. An arc surrounds the number giving an analog indication of the charge percentage, going from a full circle for 100% to a half circle for 50% to nothing for 0% (although the whole screen will probably be blank if the battery is truly at 0%). Also the color of this metric changes to indicate the level of charge going from green (50% - 100% charge), to yellow (25% - 50%), and finally red (less than 25%).
•  Heart rate. Current heart rate measured in Beats Per Minute (BPM).
•  Step count. Steps taken since midnight.
•  Moon Phase. This will show an icon that shows an approximation of the moon phase. More details about the moon phase icon are found in the Moon Phase Indicator section.
•  Calories expended. Calories expended during the day, measured in kCals since midnight.
•  Distance traveled. $istance traveled throughout the day, measured in kilometers since midnight.
•  Meters ascended. Vertical distance ascended, measured in meters since midnight.
•  Active minutes. Time not spent lazing on the couch.
•  Respiration. How fast you are breathing, measured in Breaths Per Minute (BPM).
•  Temperature. Shows the cached value for the temperature as reported by the watch. This creates two problems with the temperature metric:
  • Stale cached data. The watch only caches the last weather data from the attached phone, which typically updates its data every 20 min (I've heard rumors that Apple phones only check the weather every hour). To give some hint of how stale the weather data is Facade will colorize the temperature metric, going from green (data less that 35 min old), to yellow (data less that 65 min old) to orange (data less that 125 min old) to red (data greater than 125 min old).
  • Locaion. Note that the temperature reported is not the temperature where you are standing. Garmin gets its weather data from the closest official weather station. Note the two ill defined terms in that sentence. Since Garmin refuses to identify which weather station it is using you are left to guess that the watch is showing you the temperature somewhere, presumably nearby.

Timezone configuration

Every time you use the Connect IQ or the Garmin Express app to set a new timezone (either the main or secondary timezone) the watch will store that timezone in a timezone cache (the cache contains no more than 16 entries and the same cache is used for both the main and secondary timezone) on the watch itself. When setting the timezone through the on device settings you can only select a timezone that is in that cache. For example, I live in the US where we have 6 major timezones. I use the Connect IQ app to configure each of those timezones once and then I can easily use the on device settings to set any US timezone I want. Note that you can always set any of the 327 timezones from the Connect IQ or Garmin Express apps, it's only the on device settings that are limited to the timezone cache.

Other settings

• AM/PM off
There is no AM/PM indication on the watch face (I guess you have to look out the window and see if the sun is shining).
• PM only
In the afternoon PM will be shown just below the center of the watch.
• AM/PM
An AM or PM, as appropriate, will always be displayed just below the center of the watch.
• Hands CCW
If set the hands of the watch will run counter clockwise. (I don't recommend using this all the time unless you're a masochist that likes headaches, it is remarkably hard to read the time when the hands are going backward but, as a prank, you can really mess with someone who insists upon borrowing your watch).
• Reset TZ cache
This will reset the timezone cache so that all entries are deleted except one for the Local timezone, and, as an obvious side effect, this will set the main and secondary timzones to Local.

Moon Phase Indicator

Moon phase approximation

There are two issues that make identifying the correct moon phase extremely hard:

• Lunar cycle
The moon completes its cycle of phases in 29.5 days (more precisely in 29.530588853 but who's keeping track).
• Lunar orbit
It's an elipse rather than a circle which means the various phases other than a new moon can appear at slightly different times during the lunar cycle.

Having said that, Facade attempts to be fairly accurate. It calculates the current lunar day by comparing the current date to the reference date of the new moon on January 6, 2000 (I wanted to use the reference date of Januaray 1, 1900 but the Garmin date/time routines don't like dates before the Unix epoch of January 1, 1972), modulo 29.5(30588853). This calculation seems to be fairly accurate (the same calculation is certainly correct for the 44,206 days from the new moon on January 1, 1900 to the new moon on January 12, 2021). This results in a lunar day of 1 - 29 (actually, some months it turns out to be 1-30 because of roundoff with the lunar period).

The lunar day is then converted to one of 8 icons (representing the moon waxing from new moon to full moon and then back a new moon), each icon representing 2-3 days for that particular moon phase. This conversion is offset by 1 day so that the icon appears for the day before the phase, the actual phase itself and then 1 day after the phase (give or take a day depending upon rounding errors).

Building from soure

The problem comes in if you need to change the timezone data like adding a new timezone or deleting one. By definition the Garmin architecture requires at least 2 linked source files, the settings.xml file that shows the timezones presented to the user in the settings app and the actual timezone data that is encoded in an MC code file.¹ The basic design is to do just that, the settings.xml entries have an index that selects the appropriate entry from the timezone data table.

There are 2 problems with this basic design:

• Having 2 different files that need to be kept in sync is a maintenance nightmare and devotely to be avoided.
• Keeping all the data for 327 timezones causes memory problems on watches that have restricted memory (using a single, large table crashed on a Forerunner 55).

The scond problem is solved by breaking up the timezone data into 50 entry chunks and then storing each chunk is a separate MC file. This way the code only has to have in memory 50 timezone entries at a time rather than 327. The code in Tz.mc does the translation from one of the 327 timezone indices to an appropriate index in the appropriate TzData file.

This unfortunately makes the first problem (keeping multiple files in sync) even worse as now have to keep 7 files (settings.xml and 6 different timezone data files) in sync rather than just two.

The solution is to maintain a canonical timezone data base file, support/country.txt and use the Pearl script support/tz.pl to extrace everything we need from the data file. Running the command tz.pl support/country.txt will generate a settings.xml file and the 6 different TzData files. After generating these 7 files you have to manually (sorry about that, there doesn't seem to be a way to do includes in settings files) add the generated lines in settings.xml to the appropriate places in the actual resources/settings/settings.xml file. Then copy all of the TzData files into source/TzInfo and you should be ready to build.