Oboo Smart Clock - Very Disappointed

20 Mar 2019

I was very excited to try out my Oboo Smart Clock. I really wanted to demonstrate some of the features to my wife who wondered why I would back a clock on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box experience was not very good. The instructions included were minimal, which would have been fine if everything had functioned correctly. They have a browser based app (not a downloadable mobile app as the instructions imply). The app is not well designed and because the scroll boxes don't scroll - you have to guess what acceptable input is based on the ones that you can see. And once you have done the basic setup - if you try to use the reconfigure option to fix a setting, it appears to cause the WiFi to disconnect (or maybe it just suppresses the icon). Initially I had a problem with the battery indicator not working and I also could not change the displayed units from Metric to English. I managed to find an instruction manual using Google and did a firmware update. That fixed the problem with changing the units and it also added a calendar card (it initially had a timer card, a music card and a weather card). There is no traffic card yet. I assume that will be in an update.

Timer Card

Music Card

Calendar Card

Weather Card

If the features that are currently available would work reliably I'd be pretty satisfied, but it appears that the firmware is still extremely buggy. The gesture sensor and the touch buttons don't work consistently and after I had left it on for a few hours, the cards stopped functioning. I've been reading through the comments on the Kickstarter page and it appears that these are all problems that others have encountered. Some of them were supposedly fixed by previous software updates.

It appears that the Onion team underestimated the amount of effort required for this project and doesn't have the resources to complete it in a reasonable time frame. The User Manual that I did find is poorly written.

I do hope that they can manage to make this clock work the way that they had intended and that these are all firmware and not hardware issues. What I would really like to see is for them to make the firmware Open Source. That way, the community could help them make this a better product or at least get all the features working. I haven't seen any indication as to when the Internet Radio and Home Automation Integration might show up.

Top Comments

Parents

simsong over 6 years ago

Do you know if they have made the developer's kit available?
- Cancel
- Vote Up 0 Vote Down
- Sign in to reply
- More
- Cancel
ralphjy over 6 years ago in reply to simsong

Not that I know of. They are still doing software development though. You can see the status here: https://getoboo.com/software/ Last updated: June 14, 2019

The features on my clock are still not stable, but it works great as a plain digital clock.

You can enable SSH via the Settings page. Not sure what they had provided with the Maker Edition, I would assume an SDK. Maybe someone else who got that version can comment.
- Cancel
- Vote Up 0 Vote Down
- Sign in to reply
- More
- Cancel
simsong over 6 years ago in reply to ralphjy

They are doing development, but I can't find their source code, instructions to compile it, and instructions to load it into the clock. There are so many things wrong with their software! And the way that the thing is configured is just so unprofessional — you need to make it your WiFi hotspot and then access its internal web browser. And they say "don't use a cell phone browser, they don't work properly, use a desktop browser." It would be far better (and easier for them to engineer) to simply put it on your network and configure it through a control panel on a remote server.

So it seems that the development team is really over its head on this, and that they don't have solid software engineering experience, and no plan to get out.

I was never able to figure to what made the maker edition a "maker edition." However, isn't all of the software GPL'ed?
- Cancel
- Vote Up 0 Vote Down
- Sign in to reply
- More
- Cancel
ralphjy over 6 years ago in reply to simsong

It could be that what was provided with the maker edition was documentation of the basic framework, i.e. what combination of scripts and executables are used to make the clock work. Maybe Onion would or already has made that generally available. I know if you peruse their community forum that there is interesting stuff that can be done - e.g. creating your own cards using MQTT https://getoboo.com/community/topic/creating-your-own-card/

If the base clock starts working reliably, I may try some customization. I just don't want to be debugging intermittent behavior.

There seems to be an active gitter community if you're interested - https://gitter.im/oboo-development/community
- Cancel
- Vote Up +1 Vote Down
- Sign in to reply
- More
- Cancel
simsong over 6 years ago in reply to ralphjy

Thanks for the links. That's very helpful.
- Cancel
- Vote Up 0 Vote Down
- Sign in to reply
- More
- Cancel

Comment

simsong over 6 years ago in reply to ralphjy

Thanks for the links. That's very helpful.
- Cancel
- Vote Up 0 Vote Down
- Sign in to reply
- More
- Cancel

Children

No Data