ooooooooooooooooooooooo this looks like some fun.
would be awesome to see 2 or 4 of these implicated ats motion detection for each limb of a person and make it a useful interface for virtual reality stuff. i imagine this could be usefull in “wii” control and such for the arobics and other things but we shall see how it turns out

Its really good to see companies like TI and ST Micro embrace the hobbyist crowd, even in a small way. I was at a company meeting where a representative from Atmel spoke and I was very worried by his remark that they were going to shift their efforts from the hobbyist market due to (unsurprisingly) low margins and profits. Keep the niche market happy, and you’ll never know when that next big order will come in from the engineer who now has to recommend a MCU for their company’s new product. Guess which brand their gonna choose? Yup… the one they got to play with and know the most.

Make it secure by having it encrypted based on your own heartbeat plus or minus. If somebody else puts it on, the average is likely to be different.

Man, I’m so getting one of these! It’d be great to replace my Polar chest strap/watch set up with, get some logging out of it, etc. Among other things!

@Skitchin: Uh, what do you expect? Anything with built-in firmware or software is only going to be compatible with X, Y and Z out of the box. Depending on the model you get, it supports 433, 868, or 915 MHz; no reason you couldn’t use any sensor talking on those frequencies.

RevAaron: I was hoping the HRM was actually built into the watch. I have a chest strap but more often than not I just don’t feel like throwing it and a watch on before I hop on my bike.

Jeez sorrynshit for triple posting, but just thought I’d note that the product link in the article is for the World Wide version… http://www.ti-estore.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=EZ430-Chronos-915 appears to be the North American version, though I’m not sure if it matters…someone please tell me, because I just ordered worldwide version =P

@AllenKll:

These types of displays are the least of your battery concerns on a device like this. The LCD will take comparatively nothing to run when you consider all the other hardware this thing has onboard.

Personally, I would much rather it had a dot matrix display, as you could convey much more information. But for this price, it is hard to complain.

As Mike implied, this was announced and made orderable for MCU Day attendees several months ago, so there may be a long line in front of you if you order one now. IIRC the first “demo” was at the Embedded Systems Conference about a year ago…

Putting together the details to offer a demo platform like this in significant quantities for $50 sounds like a daunting task. (actually, even for some of the simpler cheap demo platforms like the EZ430…)

Pressure sensor? Nice, now I can finally have a skydiving altimeter I can program myself. Would be nice to have altitude, drop rate and hart rate monitored in one nice package.

I’ve ordered one, it’s a nice watch for 41 dollars including shipping. It’s even got some awesome features! Now to find me a cheap, compatible chest strap…

I don’t think you should necessarily be looking at this as a good hobbyist’s dev system. I don’t think TI is really targeting hobbyists at all with this particular system–I’ve been following this and some stuff on the msp430f5xx cores (which is what’s inside the cc430, iirc), and there’s been a crapload of silicon and debugging bugs with this chip. Hopefully they’re fixed by now, but I don’t think this is exactly for the faint of heart, since people have been having quite a number of debugging issues with the chips. Also, this chip is really designed for more integration and lower power, things that I’m pretty sure your typical hobbyist’s project don’t consider much. Keep in mind that if you’re doing anything in the watch form factor and actually want to be making something usable, you’re going to have to code very carefully to keep the power down.

Heart rate monitoring might sound cool and might seem as if it might actually be just a fun hobbyist’s project, but I think this is actually a market TI is currently trying to create.

Keep in mind, too, that gcc and all of the free unlimited compilers (and a lot of the not free compilers, too, for that matter) for msp430 won’t work at all with these guys–these are top of the line, brand new ICs, and I doubt any of the free software guys are going to bother updating their compilers anytime soon.

oh and btw, according to digikey the ship date is in january.

don’t get me wrong with my last comment–this is the COOLEST THING EVER, and I’ve been waiting for the CC430 series of ICs to come out since a year ago or so, and I was actually getting worried that TI was scrapping the project because of management problems or something since it’d taken so long, but now it turns out the chip is actually coming out–this is GREAT!

Just wanted to give a heads up that this might not be the easiest project to work with.

Wow as already stated the heart rate monitor watches used to be hundreds of dollars. Without the programmability…. Pure badass.

Mike’s coupon code worked. $30 and change, shipped. I’m pumped.

Shame it’s not BLE in the watch rather than proprietary wireless. :(

Nope, it supports over the air firmware upgrading.

The accelerometers would lets you count your steps (arm swings) without an extra device. I need to monitor my cadence (number of steps/minute) for running so this would be really useful…

Brilliant, the coupon works, ordered two to see if they can talk to each other, for the fun of it.
I may want to try to give an old RF gps unit that I have laying around a second life with this.

@Ben

I had the same problem, and emailed them about it, and they called be back as well. I ordered them the next day during business hours and then site work ed fine???

@oys

433 is available in February where the 868 is available on mid december. 433 is interesting because remote doorbells use this frequency as well, so that alone would be a fun hack/prank. I ordered the 868 one, because I want one NOW!

@radon222: Swinging one’s arms doesn’t seem like it would be usable in place of footfalls. I suppose you could buy two of these watches and use one as a belt or shoe worn pedometer slave to the one on your wrist.

Look what I found: GCC toolchain MSP430http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/.

Now I will be ordering an 868-version (maybe it will one day talk to an 868 xbee.

I can think of lots of ways in which this could be developed into a commercial product:

-Man down monitor (for security and health sector)
-Researching sleep-patterns/daily activity (using accelerometer)
-Panic alarm button (for security and healt sector)
-Smart alarm clock that won’t stop ringing until the accelerometer detects you are up and moving.

Will be interesting to measure what kind of range this thing gets.
-

I’ve got a bunch of Home Easy home automation sockets which use 433MHz. I currently control them from my PC with the help of an Arduino. Would be awesome to able to the lights in my house on and off using a watch.

Unfortunately the TI eStore seems to be broken again as I keep getting the Invalid HTTP response error. I guess they’ve got until February to fix it.

@Vin: I was wondering about the same thing. 868 is legal in Europe. 915 is legal in US. 433 is legal both places. Apart from that I don’t know

Finally got mine ordered. I gave up with the website and put it a support request, they phoned me up the next day and took my details to complete the order.

For those of you wondering what frequency to get, take a look at this for pairing the watch with an Arduino:
http://hackaday.com/2009/08/30/cheap-wireless-for-microcontrollers/

Yep just got mine today…

Mine also just arrived!!!

They don’t seem to give you much help when it comes to programming the watch, so feel free to post links to some guides lol. Otherwise the watch is great so far, just arrived friday in the mail.

your fault for having a job

Great post. I just stumbled upon your post and wanted to let you know that I have enjoyed your blog posts. I’ll subscribe to see if you write any more updates.

Just worked for me , came from the TI MSP430 hackaday.