One of the ultimate objects of desire in the early 1980s was the Seiko TV wristwatch. It didn’t matter that it required a bulky external box in your pocket for its electronics, it was a TV on your wrist, and the future was here! Of course, now we have the technology to make wrist-mounted video a practical reality, but it’s sad to see we’ve opted to use our phones for video and never really followed up on the promise of a wrist-mounted television. There’s always hope though, and here it is in the form of [Dave Bennett]’s ESP32-powered TikTok wristwatch.
On the wrist is the ESP32 itself with an audio DAC and amplifier, LCD screen, and battery, but sadly this combo doesn’t have quite the power to talk to TikTok directly. Instead that’s done using Python on a companion PC with the resulting videos uploaded to the device over WiFi. It’s not the bulky electronics of the Seiko TV, so we’ll take it. All the info can be found on GitHub, and there’s a YouTube video below the break.
So the viral videos of a generation can now be taken on the move without resorting to a slightly less portable mobile phone. It may not be the most unobtrusive of timepieces, but it’ll certainly get you noticed.
That’s a poor attempt at a Dad joke, like the eye-pad when we wanted an iPad. This is what we really want…
https://www.theodmgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/dsc02083.jpg
But Dad Jokes ARE a poor attempt at humor!
I think it is the 1st rule in The Book of Dadding!
Why would I want voluntary put cancer on my hand?
Exactly. Tiktok is for eight year olds.
It’s worse than that, it’s 100% pure cancer extract, all the worst parts of youtube, purified and refined to 10,000x natural potency with a secret Swiss process.
I read that as putrefied instead of purified. Works either way. Pure algorithmic ADHD targeting cancer. [I don’t mean that as a slight against those with ADHD, rather, I mean Tik-Tok appears to target those with short attention spans]
And that secret Swiss process must be balanced by using a watch…
So you can get that dopamine hit to refill your microscopic attention span
Great build. I like the explanation of how the audio/video stream is processed. I would have thought you’d want to buffer the data but just throwing it at the device seems to work well.