Conventional wristwatches are seen on wrists much less ceaselessly lately. Most individuals decide to make use of their telephones to verify the time, and people who nonetheless wish to put on a watch are likely to lean in the direction of smartwatches. From the standpoint of practicality, this makes a number of sense. Why have a whole machine devoted to nothing greater than telling the time these days?
However watches will not be solely about perform — they can be an vital a part of one’s private model. For {hardware} hacker Sahko, that model occurs to be fairly uncommon, so he determined to make his personal wristwatch. On the floor, his watch may inform the time, but it surely additionally screams, “I simply arrived on this quaint period from the distant future.” No cellphone or industrial smartwatch available on the market goes to provide off these vibes.
Prototyping the circuit (📷: Sahko)
The inspiration for all the mission is the HCMS2901 amber LED dot-matrix show module. After breadboarding a prototype with a Raspberry Pi Pico, Sahko began engaged on the ultimate {hardware} design. The thought was to have the show modules cowl all the size of the wristband, so he determined to only make the wristband from a versatile PCB, which tremendously simplified the wiring.
For the reason that RP2040 microcontroller package deal utilized by the Pico is on the big facet, and it additionally requires exterior flash reminiscence and an oscillator, Sahko as an alternative settled on utilizing the STMicroelectronics STM32U083KCU6. This all-in-one package deal solely must be provided with energy, so a LiPo battery and charging circuit rounded out the design. The clasp is made out of a pin header, which can also be used for charging the battery.
With 14 shows, the battery would solely final about two hours in the event that they have been used constantly. So a set of three buttons was added to activate the screens and alter the brightness stage.
This watch will certainly get seen (📷: Sahko)
With all of that display actual property, one thing actually particular wanted to be carried out to make correct use of it. Because of this, Sahko coded a very slick, Matrix-like digital rain impact that exhibits on the entire screens earlier than the present time is displayed. And anyway, random characters will clearly float throughout each display sooner or later.
If you wish to get your palms on considered one of these watches, there will probably be a number of obstacles standing in your method. At first, the show modules value about $30 every, which suggests a typical watch will value over $400 in shows alone. Other than that, the versatile PCB shouldn’t be precisely the perfect materials for a wristband, so solder joints fail ceaselessly and you’d be prone to spend extra time repairing the watch than really carrying it. But when that’s not sufficient to discourage you, the {hardware} design and supply code can be found on GitHub.
