Garmin Chinese Watch Face

A Garmin watch face that displays the time in Chinese characters

November 2025

This year I bought a Garmin to help me train for a half marathon (and hopefully a full marathon in the future). I like some of the watch faces available on the the Garmin store, including a watch face I found that displays the time in Chinese.

Drawing with the Garmin SDK is a lot like the HTML5 Canvas, so I felt like I could add some decorations to the watch face I already liked.

I added waves, in the style of how clouds are often drawn in Asian art to the background. It is reminiscent of how dive watches often have wave backgrounds too. I also added a seconds hand ring to give the watch some motion.

現在是幾點

Garmin Connect IQ Store Description

View the time in Chinese, great for students! Watch features a second hand and a decorative wave background.

NOTE: This watchface does NOT require a APAC/Taiwan/China/HK model to be able to display Chinese.

Garmin Tilemapper

Garmin only installs Chinese on watches sold in Chinese speaking countries. That means in order to display Chinese we need to “install” it ourselves. There is a wonderful library that has already done that called garmin-tilemapper.

This library includes a sprite sheet with enough Chinese characters to display the time and the code needed to go from a character like 中 to the coordinates in the application.

Developing for Connect IQ

Garmin’s development environment is called Connect IQ, and the language used is a proprietary one called Monkey C. It’s a stripped-down, C-like language with a small standard library and strict memory constraints — watch faces run with very limited RAM and processing power.

The drawing API is where the HTML5 Canvas parallel is strongest. You get a device context, a coordinate system, and a set of drawing primitives: drawLine, drawCircle, fillPolygon, and so on. If you’ve ever drawn something on a canvas, the mental model transfers well.

With my experience making <canvas> art, the wave background was something I was well equipped to make. The waves are drawn as a collection of arcs, connected by lines, with other lines to block parts of it.

Publishing to the Connect IQ Store

Getting the watch face onto the Garmin Connect IQ store required signing up for a developer account and submitting through Garmin’s portal. The review process did not take long.

I plan on creating more watch faces in the future, and I quite like wearing a watch, especially one with my own art on it.