The Smartest Smart Watch Is The One You Make Yourself

If you’re building a smart watch these days (yawn!), you’ve got to have some special sauce to impress the jaded Hackaday community. [Dominic]’s NeoPixel SmartWatch delivers, with his own take on what’s important to have on your wrist, and just as importantly, what isn’t.

There’s no fancy screen. Instead, the watch gets by with a ring of NeoPixels for all its notification needs. But notification is what it does right. It tells [Dominic] when he’s got an incoming call of course, but also has different flashing color modes for SMS, Snapchat, and e-mail. Oh yeah, and it tells time and even has a flashlight mode. Great functionality for a minimalistic display.

But that’s not all! It’s also got a light sensor that works from the UV all the way down to IR. At the moment, it’s being used to automatically adjust the LED brightness and to display current UV levels. (We imagine turning this into a sunburn alarm mode.) Also planned is a TV-B-Gone style IR transmitter.

The hardware is the tough part of this build, and [Dominic] ended up using a custom PCB to help in cramming so many off-the-shelf modules into a tiny space. Making it look good is icing on the cake.

Thanks [Marcello] for the tip!

10 thoughts on “The Smartest Smart Watch Is The One You Make Yourself

  1. Needs to be able to send feedback back to the phone to be able to dismiss calls really, which I don’t see listed as a function. But it’s still a nice thingy.
    Oh and if it could send feedback it could also start an audio recording and such things.
    .

  2. It’s interesting to see the different features or functionalities that different people see as important in their devices.

    But even more importantly the fact the people do this for fun is awesome . Well done

    Sure it’s lacking features of a smart watch I would use but if I was able to put something like that together I would be pretty pleased with myself anyway.

    B

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.