I charge it every night. I use a battery right next to the bed. I have my earphone in my phone listening to the radio and spoken readings all night . Has about 20% battery left after a heavy use day. The nice thing is that the watch charges to 99% in about 20 minutes.
And welcome to FUD! @ChiCubs2132 . I think you’ll like the place.
I was charging every night, ended up not continuing with this as I kept missing readings, too intermittent. Should have probably troubleshot some more may have been a week transmitter battery or something
@jweaverak You can check the charge on your transmitter batteries in “system status”. There is voltage A, voltage B, and resistance on the “G5/G6” system status tab.
Missed readings is usually a symptom of concurrent use of xDrip and the Dexcom receiver. If that’s the case and you want to continue xDrip+ then unpair the transmitter and receiver and plug in the receiver to power and put it away.
Hope you figure things out! Let me know.
i am thinking about going with the Polar M600. xdrip supports the M600 with a patch, do you know anyone who uses the M600 with xdrip?
@ChiCubs2132 The Polar M600 should work just fine with the patch. You may be able to find some talk about it on gitter. Might take some searching.
Does this really work? I was told no watch could stand alone as a receiver for dexcom? I am looking at options for my daughter at school so she isn’t having to pull her phone out.
@Kerilynn97 Yes, it absolutely works! I have been using my watch as the receiver for almost 2 years.
The problem is that there are only a few that will work, and you have to use xDrip+, which takes a little effort. The link above in this thread gives you details on the watches that will work. The Sony Smart Watch 3 is the only one that works out of the box, and it is not easy to get as it’s been discontinued. The other watches require a patch to be applied to them. And this only works with Android, not iPhone.
You also need to keep the phone in proximity if you want Share capability.
If you need help setting it up just let me know.
Edit: Sorry, that link is:
My son uses the Dexcom app to his phone, and his phone to his watch, but I can confirm his control and the way he feels about his diabetes in school has improved since he started to wear the watch. So good for you on trying to work this out.
I also have had success using Xdrip with a Sony Smartwatch 3 as a direct receiver for the Dexcom G5 and I have successfully installed the patched firmware to allow an Asus Zenwatch 3 to work as a receiver. The Zenwatch 3 is a much nicer looking watch, but the Sony is MUCH easier to use since installing the patched firmware is somewhat complicated and the instructions are not very good.
I don’t think either watch is in production anymore, but they are relatively easy to find on eBay. I got the Smartwatch 3 (SWR50) for $60 on eBay and the Zenwatch 3 for $110, although they typically go for a bit more than that.
Dexcom’s solution for using a smartwatch is incredibly stupid, but has the advantage of working with pretty much any smart watch. Briefly, with Dexcom’s solution you need a supporter phone that receives the data from the transmitter and uploads it to Dexcom’s server in the cloud. Then the smartwatch connects to the phone and uses it to connect to Dexcom and download the data from the cloud to display it. This means you use twice as much bandwidth (uploading the data and then downloading the exact same data) plus if you are on an airplane, or your phone is otherwise not connected to the internet, your watch won’t display anything. Stupid solution created by lazy programmers.
xDrip is a much more elegant solution, especially if you have a watch that can work as a data collector, although getting the watch to work as a data collector can be a bit tricky.
@Peter_V, very nice post, imho worth its own thread. Is it OK with you if I spin in out?
Welcome to the forum, btw: I really look forward to your next posts!
This doesn’t sound like how it works for us. Perhaps other implementations are different.
We are using an Apple iPhone to run the Dexcom G6 Mobile app and have an Apple Watch connected in to the phone.
To test that the watch continues to receive cgm data from the phone without the need for wifi, we put the phone into airplane mode and turned on the Bluetooth. Verified no data by pulling up a browser to show no data. The watch continued to receive the cgm data from the phone. Let it run for 15 minutes to be sure. Seemed to be no issues.
I was describing the way the Android App works. I know it works this way because I spend a lot of time on airplanes.
The iPhone app appears to be different from the Android app.
Micheal, sure go ahead and spin it off as it’s own post.
@Peter_V The Dexcom implementation uses Android Wear for the companion smartwatch app on Android. This is how Android Wear has traditionally worked. Wear 2.0 has more features which can allow the companion app to work more independently, but basically Wear was developed to be a companion to the phone.
xDrip+ also has a companion Wear app for the smartwatch. Not all watches are supported but many with flash OS support for proper bluetooth stack is provided by xDrip+ developers for several watches. Using the xDrip+ Wear app you do not need to be connected to your phone since it can work as a standalone app (AND communicate directly with the Dexcom transmitter). However, you have to have been paired to your phone so that transmitter ID and other preferences are synced to your watch. The Wear companion app can upload the Dex data to your phone via Bluetooth (if you are in range) or WiFi if it it is enabled on your watch. So there are a few options. Once on your phone, xDrip+ uploads the Dex data to any number of cloud systems (Nighscout, Tidepool), as well as AndroidAPS. Also, you can install xDrip+ on watches with full Android OS so that you do not even need a phone.
While I know that theoretically xDrip can run on a watch with a full android OS, many of the full android watches don’t support blue tooth properly. I bought a couple of the cheap full android watches and neither of them works with xDrip, one of them just hangs up and reboots when you try to synch with the transmitter.
The both also have really poor battery life, even when not running as a data collector, which seems to be a common problem with the full OS watches.
Running as a datacollector significantly reduces the battery life on both the Sony SW3 and Zenwatch 3, but they both still last long enough. The Zenwatch lasts about 20 hours and the SW3 perhaps a bit over 1 day.
Thanks for your feedback re full android watches. It’s a nice idea but probably not practical given the battery requirements. I almost always carry an extra battery pack with me to charge up my watch. But not during exercise, of course:)
Hi everybody
First of all, I would like to mention that I’m very glad to find this topic, it is perfect for me.
I would like to ask if can anyone tell if they tried to connect Dexcom G5 on other smartwatches thru xDrip+ ? Of course other smartwatches that has the same technical specification like Sony 3 SWR50 (I mean minimum of )
Many thanks in advance
HI @mcostan I currently use G5, with XDrip and the Huawei Watch 2. I did not have to flash the OS on the watch, somehow everything just worked.