Garmin Chinese Watch Face

現在是幾點

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.

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.