For those who bought a SL8541E smartwatch

Unsupported Watches
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Good day to all, thanks for your hard work. I don’t know if this is the right place to post this.

I have one of those new smartwatches with the SL8541E chip, and as has been stated, they are not supported here for some very good reasons. Sadly, for some like myself, buying this kind of stuff it’s the only way to get affordable tech useful to us. So i’d like to share what I have done to make one of these smartwatches useful for my routines.

I bought the smartwatch with the hopes of:

  • Running with it and record my route using GPS while listen to music, without carrying my smartphone
  • Having a SIM card so my wife can call me while I’m running

My model, 1+16 setup, works great in those 2 aspects, but I wanted more, so I have achieved:

  • Making it turn on screen when I shake my wrist
  • Having “automatic brightness”
  • Using it connected to my smartwatch for notifications
  • Overcome (kind of) the aggressive battery saver system

And to get that working, I’m using Tasker and it’s plugins SecureTask and Lux.

  • Making it turn on screen when I shake my wrist:
    I ask Tasker to detect the shake from my wrist while the screen is off. When the conditions are met, Tasker fires the SecureTask plugin to turn the screen on. A very high sensitivy will use more battery, so I configured it to work with a little shake

  • Having “automatic brightness”:
    Related to the previous point, when turning on the screen, Tasker also fires the Lux plugin, which reads light conditions taken from the camera on the screen (becase the device doesn’t have a light sensor) and adjust the brightness of the device accordingly. This can cause more battery consumption but it’s great to know that you don’t have to struggle to see the time under direct sun.

  • Using it connected to my smartphone for notifications:
    This is very knew here: Installing Watchdroid in both the smartwatched and the smartphone gets the two in communication.

  • Overcome (kind of) the aggressive battery saver system:
    This is very tricky, and I hope someday I would be able to root this device (I haven’t found yet an original firmware file from the device to overcome this), so for now this is the best I can achieve. If someone know how to overcome this, I’d be really happy to know it.

In these devices, after some minutes with your screen off, all the background apps are closed except the system apps. So I have configure in Tasker that each 5 minutes, the smartwatch does the following:

  • Make appear a Pop-Up completely black over all the screen (This turns on the screen but you barely notice it because it’s black).
  • While showing the black Pop-up that make it look like the screen is off, Tasker opens Watchdroid, SecureTask, Lux in the background.
  • The screen turns off after 7 seconds

All that steps make the device “refresh” the apps in the background so it mostly avoids that get closed.

I’d really love to know if someone as achieve the same results but with better ideas or more technical knowledge.

I hope this helps.

2 Likes
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Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

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Hi @Benji_Betanzo, could you please share which specific watch this is? I’m looking for a very similar use case for a running watch. Thanks for the great information!

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The original Aliexpress page was deleted, but this one looks similar (please consider that mine doesn’t come with a vibration module, that means it won’t vibrate):

Aliexpress

I made a mistake, my device is 1+8

Keep in mind that you could get interference in the street while using the smartwatch with TWS earbuds, so the connection keeps falling as you run. In my case, I have to use one of this devices very close to the smartwatch, with regular earphones, to avoid that problem:

Aliexpress

1 Like
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Thanks for the info!

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How did u do it it doesn’t work for me

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None of that Bluetooth crap.

Enable developer options
Go to developer options → AVRCP Bluetooth version
Choose the AVRCP 1.6 option

You will increase significantly your Bluetooth audio link with this.

Tested on Android 9, 9.1, 10, 11, 12, works till today without any problem.

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from what i can see on an XDA thread about these unisoc watch’s, it’s quite difficult to get to developer options, if anybody gets a watch were this part of android is implemented it might be useful to let the forum know

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Developer settings can be accessed on some of these watches by installing settings search

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In my case, it wasn’t more difficult than what I used to do it on my old Android 9 phone.
I have a Lemfo lemp and was very easy on his moment.

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Well in my case it says to me to enable developers options first

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Cool, I’ll try it as soon as I get how to enable developer options, as stated by others, the unisoc’s smartwatches are weird… I read in XDA that some people have got it by installing a settings app, I’ll try that too

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Hi, what exactly didn´t work?

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The apps I tried wouldn’t let me enable developer options, only through the unisoc engineer options you can enable USB debugging.

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It did work I mean but it’s hard to configure tasks like these in Tasker they don’t seem to work when screen turns off

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Did u try to enable them?

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I´m guessing your device, as mine, have that damn aggresive mode that shuts down any app after some minutes (I guess when the screen goes off). For that is the task that run each X minutes (in my case, 5 minutes), renewing the apps in the background, even Tasker itself

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I tried but no luck

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This usually works

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Works for?