The white-on-blue screen that shipped with the #twatch really requires the backlight to be visible. Here’s an updated firmware that has the backlight on at power-up. The new firmware is loaded over the network using tools already available in most operating systems, Windows instructions here.
We apologize for the lack of refinement. We prototyped with a cheap grey-on-green screen that didn’t normally require the backlight. The firmware posted to the Google Code project page went into the Seeed #twatches unmodified to ensure that yours matched the original. Everyone would probably have preferred that the #twatch ship with the backlight enabled by default.
In the next update we’ll tweak the refresh rate from 60 vs 120 hertz, as well as the scrolling speed. Do you have any other specific requests for the standard #twatch firmware?
Image by andrewholmes.
Maybe it would be nice to turn the backlight on / off by trapping a printed character? Or is this already possible. So that you could say, send a string to it to flash the screen to grab someones attention as an alert (ie, a new mail message, urgent news, server down, etc).
I had my twatch in a box for a couple of years. I finally cracked it out yesterday and found the backlight wasn’t backlighting. So I took a more hardware oriented approach and soldered pin 16 of the LCD connection to ground.