A Homebrew Binary Wristwatch

watch

There are 2 types of people in the world; those who know binary, those who don’t, and those who know ternary. [Emanuele] thought a binary wristwatch is the pinnacle of nerd and set out to build his own. The resulting binary clock not only screams nerd as intended, but is also a functional time piece, as well.

The idea of a binary wristwatch came to [Emanuele] while he was working with PICs at school. Not wanting to let that knowledge go to waste, he used a PIC16F628 microcontroller for this build. There are four LEDs for the hours and six LEDs for the minutes, each attached to a separate microcontroller pin for easy programming.

To keep time, [Emanuele] kept the PIC in sleep mode most of the time, only waking it up when a an internal timer’s register overflows. The watch spends most of its time sleeping, sipping power from a coin cell battery with a battery life that should last weeks, at least.

The entire circuit is tucked away in a PVC enclosure with a wonderful rainbow ribbon cable band. We’re not so sure about how that feels against the skin all day, but it does exude the nerd cred [Emanuele] was looking for.

15 thoughts on “A Homebrew Binary Wristwatch

  1. We’re not so sure about how that feels against the skin all day, but it does exude the nerd cred [Emanuele] was looking for.

    As it also exudes phthalates into your skin.

    1. I think it’s pretty damn cool. Sure, it’s not going to sell a million units, but I think it’s quite nicely thought out and packaged for a homebrew project. Stuff like this is why I read hackaday.

  2. I died a little on the inside when you ruined the joke in the very first sentence. 0b10. 2 is not a valid binary number. Do you even binary bro? ;)

    That aside pretty slick build, at first I thought that was perf board then noticed the traces. It might not feel comfortable against the skin but that seems to be a common trend in fashion/trend/anything to distinguish oneself.

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