Here’s the Reddit thread with more feedback from the creator[0]. Amazingly gets a week between charges[1]<p>[0]<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartwatch_from_scratch/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...</a><p>[1]<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartwatch_from_scratch/em3sqbv/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...</a>
My first reaction when I read the title was to complete the sentence in my mind: “…and it sucks”.<p>But I'm very glad I was wrong in my scepticism. This is freaking amazing on so many levels.<p>Edit: It’s been a while since I’ve been so excited about a project. Now I can’t work just thinking of taking a month off to play with this thing :)
We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.
I was expecting a brick on wrist, but this surprised me! And the circuit looks simple. I love the charging dock and textual of the watch frame! Screen resolution is a bit low though. I'd join if there's an open source community dedicated to work on this stuff, I think there's a lot of room improve the OS and software. I'm glad to have seen this!
The DA14683 is fantastic. I played a bit with an eval. board and it's really good for it's price vs. features (~$3 for 250 pcs. at Mouser). But soon the idea of releasing code for it as Open Source faded away, since you need to sign an SLA (<a href="https://support.dialog-semiconductor.com/connectivity/request-access-restricted-content" rel="nofollow">https://support.dialog-semiconductor.com/connectivity/reques...</a>), that limits the way source code based on their in SDK is released (only to your customer, in an only “need to know” basis). I hate when this happens.<p>I wonder how the creator of this watch managed to publish the source code, including the Dialog SDK; if there is a <i>backdoor</i> I am missing.
I googled and added it up (just out of curiosity) using the BOM, and total cost was ~$88USD (not counting shipping)<p>Also, the OS is FreeRTOS (Open sourced by AWS/Amazon in '17) if anyone is interested
I would have been impressed with anything functional, but to me this actually looks nicer than the vast majority of commercially produced smart watches. Awesome!
This is really cool and as a software guy the electrical engineering component is a huge black box to me. Circuit boards all connected up and getting a physical device to handle lithium ion batteries to properly charge and not blow up is beautiful. He does a great job with pictures, videos, and giving detail at both a high level and semi-in-depth explanations really made it shine.<p>Is there anyone that does similar type of posts? Or even a follow along type of deal to get feet wet with actually building devices (maybe it includes a list of items to buy first)? Don't get me wrong I love writing software but showing someone something you physically made as opposed to sending a link to a website seems so much more satisfying.
This is nicely done, beautiful aesthetics.
There are multiple phases (HW, SW, Mechanics) which would be impressive enough on their own. Kudos!<p>Love the little gifs to explain how it's done, especially the stenciling of the PCB.<p>I'm curious, how/why did you choose the DA14683 chip?
The CCCamp 2019 badge will be a (low cost) smart watch called card10:<p><a href="https://gitlab.hamburg.ccc.de/card10/logix" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.hamburg.ccc.de/card10/logix</a>
I clicked thinking, this is just a guy who'll disassemble a smartwatch and put his DIY housing and strap on it.<p>But man! I was so wrong, and I'm totally impressed.
To save folks a click, copy, and paste, the GitHub project is <a href="https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC</a>
That is really lovely — and truly from scratch, including the software!<p>The first photo looks a lot like Android Wear, so first I assumed this would be using a prepackaged OS, but it isn't!<p>The source code is in on Github alongside schematics, PCB files and everything else:
<a href="https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC/tree/master/Software" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC/tree/master/So...</a>
I'm still disappointed that new smart watch development has seemingly stalled in progress as of late. I was hoping that by this time we'd have watches that had 24 hour battery life, and an always on display that didn't need a flick of the wrist to activate. I hoped that wouldn't be asking for much, but I guess it's harder than I assumed.
Very impressive and inspiring.<p>I've been thinking about making a custom keyboard for a while now but, while I have no problems with the electronic and software side of things, I'm a bit overwhelmed with the 3D modelling required.<p>I tried learning Blender but it really feels ill-suited for designing physical objects. The author mentions considering openSCAD but I've heard pretty bad things about it so I haven't really given it a chance yet.<p>The person making the dactyl keyboard had a very interesting talk where he explain how he basically ended up writing his own DSL in clojure on top of openSCAD, maybe I should try that: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4</a> (if you enjoyed TFA you'll probably like this video as well, it's a step-by-step explanation of how he designed his dream keyboard).<p>Otherwise I suppose I'll have to betray rms and try this freeware Fusion 360 thing.
This is so awesome. It is a good learning and inspiring for others. I will add this project to DIY section of the Learn-awesome repository <a href="https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome</a>. Please add such valuable resources here.
It's interesting to know how one can build the one thing for about ~$80 even in small quantities, and everything is available, incl Source.<p>If people started selling the pre-soldered board as a smart-watch starter kit on Aliexpress , pretty sure someone would buy it.<p>This is the sort of thing that would make DIY popular, I can see why.
Very nice job! I love reading about hardware projects like this but stumble across the write-ups much less frequently/reliably compared to interesting software projects. Are there good groups/lists/sites to hear about more electronic/hardware hacking like this?
What a great project! I love how much attention to detail he put in. Fantastic, this is exactly the kind of thing I love studying and working on myself.<p>Sidenote, I'm a bit disappointed that people use imgur to showcase their projects, as I don't think it's very good for that. I built <a href="https://www.makerfol.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.makerfol.io/</a> for this exact purpose but people seem to still prefer imgur for some reason, and I'm not sure why :/
Considering there is still no good replacement for my Pebble Time, I might use this manual to build my own. The Rebble team might also be interested in this.
This is so cool. I've never heard of that microcontroller though. It has nice features and applications. Datasheet of the microcontroller he used: <a href="https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/sites/default/files/smartbondtm_da146823_product_brief_hr.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/sites/default/files/sma...</a>
Great project. I'm amazed at how much you can accomplish with today's tools and services. And using the woodfill PLA is a good way to get around the rough look of 3D printers. Great ideas here.
Wow - that's an impressive project. Ambitious and well executed.<p>...only part that had me confused was using like 25% of screen real estate for showing time and putting flowers on the other 75%. Artistic I guess.
On a related note, I was reminded of Woz's Nixie watch - <a href="https://youtu.be/m4R3hODnTGo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/m4R3hODnTGo</a>