I Built a Garmin Watch Face with Live Stock Charts in Monkey C — Here’s What I Learned

I wanted stock prices on my wrist. Not a notification — an actual chart. So I built a custom Garmin watch face with live sparkline charts for 5 configurable assets.

Here’s what I learned building StockFaceTC for the Garmin Venu 2 Plus.

The Challenge

Garmin watch faces are tiny — 124KB memory, 416×416 AMOLED display, and a language (Monkey C) that most devs have never heard of. No npm. No frameworks. No Stack Overflow answers.

Oh, and the “simulator” can’t make web requests. You test API calls on real hardware or not at all.