I turned my Garmin watch into a controller for the Flipper Zero (the Flipper stays in the bag)
We like to play around with our Flipper devices, but out in the field, they do attract a lot of attention. There have also been times when I’ve worked on a “red team”… The Flipper reveals the situation quite effectively :-) One day I thought, what if the Garmin on my wrist were a Flipper screen, and the device itself just stayed in my pocket??
It took much longer than it should have, but now it works. The watch connects via BLE, displays the same information as the Flipper, and the five buttons control its operation - Garmin users will be familiar with the button layout - it’s intuitive. Cool project - I learned a lot, and it was fun to figure it out.
Current status:
- About 0.5 fps on my Descent Mk2 - this is a remote control, not a video stream; I just want to set expectations before anyone asks
- Versions for 118 models: from the Fenix 5 Plus to the Fenix 9, Epix, Marq, Venu, Vivoactive, Forerunner, etc.
- Tested on exactly one watch - mine. So if your model is on the list and you’d like to test it, I’d love for you to do so—to be honest, that’s half the reason I’m publishing this
- The “flipper” app requires a minor software modification (a Momentum fork, opt-in switch). Reason: Connect IQ doesn’t support BLE pairing, and there’s no SMP - that is a documented hard limitation, and TockFirmware rejects RPC requests without pairing. Pre-built binaries are available, so you don’t need to compile anything
- The software is free and open source; it’s not yet available in the CIQ store, so for now it can only be installed via sideloading
A full description, including a debug log (MTU issues, watchdog issues, and all button-related issues), can be found here:
https://rdnsec.info/projects/flipper-on-garmin/
Source and download files:
https://github.com/rz-x/flipper-on-garmin
Download the .prg file for your model and let me know if the device explodes :-)