Is Your Wearable Tech Too Subtle?

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With any con, you’re going to have people walking around with things they’ve built. It’s the perfect venue for wearable tech, and the cream of the crop for HOPE X is [Zack]’s SmarTwatCh. Billed as a 3D printed big ass smart watch, it’s anything but subtle and has enough gadgets and gizmos to make even the biggest tech aficionado blush

The front of the SmarTwatCh is an authentic 2×20 glass encapsulated VFD running at 160 Volts, chosen for its danger and character. Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Teensy 3.0, pots, knobs, and switches, a laser, LEDs, and an alcohol sensor because, “the future is quantified drinking”.

‘Apps’ for this smart watch include a TV-B-Gone, laser pointer, breathalyzer, flashlight, and just about anything else [Zack] can think of that would involve a Bluetooth adapter and a text display. Video of [Zack] demoing the watch at HOPE below.

30 thoughts on “Is Your Wearable Tech Too Subtle?

  1. That is a sweet gantlet man. future additions will include. Nintendo wii mote capability. GPS locater tazer to go with laser sight. SOC with linux wifi bluetooth hands free. touch screen. EMP teslar flick knife. and ofc what was that other thing again ……. ow watch ;)

    Wicked hack man keep it it.

    1. Zack here. This was the most difficult design decision in the project. I decided to use the American pronunciation to make it sound like ‘smartwatch’.

      The name also has the nice side effect of making people doubt whether I meant to swear.

      I did.

    1. The taser can be aimed with the laser.
      Is there a non-trademark name for tasers or has it just become common usage now? “Stun gun” usually refers to the handheld contact weapons.

    2. Zack here. This is by far the most common request, and it’s a cool one. I don’t want to actually weaponize the thing, so I might compromise in a future version by adding a negative-ion generator so I can give electric handshakes.

  2. Very nice watch! On a sidenote, does everybody get their parts from sparkfun and amazon? Don’t get me wrong, i like sparkfun and did order some toys there in the past, but i source most of my stuff from digikey or mouser. For my own projects i want exactly the parts i need on a board, and not some wired together breakouts.

    1. It depends, soldering up teeny surface-mount stuff with hundreds of pins, and LCDs on flexi-PCB with no sockets available (in quantities less than 10,000) takes skill and experience. For many of us, it’s easier to pay someone else to do the hard stuff in a factory, and just plug stuff in with the minimum bother.

      You lose somewhat in flexibility, and price, but the prices are still pretty reasonable for what you get. And the alternative is either nothing at all, or sticking with through-hole stuff and gods help us, stripboard. Sparkfun etc just package up the amazing things people are putting in chips these days, onto modules with nice easy pins on them.

      So much stuff nowadays is never intended to be touched by human hands. It’s all packaged for machines that take component tapes. So it’s a valuable service getting it into accessible form.

      It’s a shame, OTOH, that tiny stuff like accelermeters need to waste so much space, putting tiny chips on bigger boards. Maybe a new standard, apart from the 0.1 IDC pins, would be nice. Our fingers could probably cope with a good bit smaller.

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