Garmin French Time

A minimalist, elegant, nerdy Garmin Connect IQ watch face that displays the current time as French Revolutionary time.

Available from Garmin Connect IQ Developer portal.

Note
French Time is part of a collection of unconventional Garmin watch faces. It has been developed for fun, as a proof of concept, and as a learning experience. It is shared as is as an open source project, with no commitment to long term maintenance and further feature development.

Please use issues to provide bug reports or feature requests.
Please use discussions for any other comments.

All feedback is wholeheartedly welcome.

Contents

• French Revolutionary time
• Features
• Project structure
• Build, test, deploy

French Revolutionary time

French Revolutionary Time (also known as Decimal time) represents the time of day using units which are decimally related. The day is divided into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds.

The Garmin French Time watch face displays the time as decimal hours decimal minutes decimal seconds (separated by space, distinguished by font weight and color). Optionally, the user may turn on standard time, displayed in smaller font below the decimal time, using on-watch customization settings.

The watch face uses custom fonts. The font presented here is Ubuntu, available from Google Fonts as a True Type font (ttf). It has been converted to a bitmap font (bmp, fnt) using the open source command-line ttf2bmp converter. The hours, minutes, and seconds are displayed with Ubuntu Bold, Medium, and Regular, respectively, size 70 pixels.

The watch face provides an option to display the hour, minutes, and seconds using the French flag colors. Note that for better readability, the color blue used here is somewhat bighter than the official color (Pantone A 503; RGB used 0000D5 vs official 000091), while the colors white (Pantone A 665) and red (Pantone A 805) are as the official colors (RGB FFFFFF and E1000F, respectively).

Features

The French Time watch face supports the following features:

Screenshot	Description
	French time Current time is diplayed as French Revolutionary time, with three groups of digits: hours, minutes, and seconds, in fonts of varying thickness (bold,medium, regular, respectively) and colors (white, light gray, dark gray, respectively).
	Standard time A setting in the Customize menu enables the user to toggle the standard time display on and off. The standard time is shown below the French time in a smaller, dimmer font.
	French flag colors A setting in the Customize menu enables the user to change the colors in which the French time is displayed: toggle between the default white-gray and using the French flag colors.

Fonts

The French Time watch face uses custom fonts:

• Ubuntu for hours (Ubuntu bold), minutes (Ubuntu medium), and seconds (Ubuntu regular).
• Ubuntu for standard time (Ubuntu regular).

The development of Garmin watch faces motivated the implementation of two useful tools:

• A TTF to FNT+PNG converter (ttf2bmp).
  Garmin watches use non-scalable fixed-size bitmap fonts, and cannot handle variable size True Type fonts directly.
• An font scaler automation tool (garmin-font-scaler).
  Garmin watches come in a variety of shapes and resolutions, and bitmap fonts need to be scaled for each device proportionally to its resolution.

The font development proceeded as follows:

• The fonts were downloaded from Google Fonts as True Type (.ttf) fonts.
• The fonts were converted to bitmaps as .fnt and .png pairs using the open source command-line ttf2bmp converter.
• The font sizes were established to match the Garmin Fenix 7X Solar watch 280x280 pixel screen resolution.
• The fonts were then scaled proportionally to match other screen sizes available on Garmin watches using the garmin-font-scaler tool.

The table below lists all font sizes provided for the supported screen resolutions.

Resolution	Shape	Element	Font	Size
148 x 205	rectangle	Hours	Ubuntu bold	37
148 x 205	rectangle	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	37
148 x 205	rectangle	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	37
148 x 205	rectangle	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	16
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Hours	Ubuntu bold	44
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	44
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	44
176 x 176	semi-octagon	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	19
215 x 180	semi-round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	45
215 x 180	semi-round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	45
215 x 180	semi-round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	45
215 x 180	semi-round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	19
218 x 218	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	54
218 x 218	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	54
218 x 218	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	54
218 x 218	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	23
240 x 240	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	60
240 x 240	rectangle	Hours	Ubuntu bold	60
240 x 240	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	60
240 x 240	rectangle	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	60
240 x 240	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	60
240 x 240	rectangle	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	60
240 x 240	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	26
240 x 240	rectangle	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	26
260 x 260	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	65
260 x 260	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	65
260 x 260	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	65
260 x 260	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	28
280 x 280	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	70
280 x 280	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	70
280 x 280	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	70
280 x 280	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	30
320 x 360	rectangle	Hours	Ubuntu bold	80
320 x 360	rectangle	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	80
320 x 360	rectangle	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	80
320 x 360	rectangle	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	34
360 x 360	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	90
360 x 360	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	90
360 x 360	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	90
360 x 360	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	39
390 x 390	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	98
390 x 390	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	98
390 x 390	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	98
390 x 390	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	42
416 x 416	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	104
416 x 416	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	104
416 x 416	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	104
416 x 416	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	45
454 x 454	round	Hours	Ubuntu bold	114
454 x 454	round	Minutes	Ubuntu medium	114
454 x 454	round	Seconds	Ubuntu regular	114
454 x 454	round	Standard time	Ubuntu regular	49

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Build, test, deploy

To modify and build the sources, you need to have installed:

• Visual Studio Code with Monkey C extension.
• Garmin Connect IQ SDK.

Consult Monkey C Visual Studio Code Extension for how to execute commands such as build and test to the Monkey C runtime.

You can use the included Makefile to conveniently trigger some of the actions from the command line.

# build binaries from sources
make build

# run unit tests -- note: requires the simulator to be running
make test

# run the simulation 
make run

# clean up the project directory
make clean

To sideload your application to your Garmin watch, see developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/connect-iq-basics/your-first-app.