Printed circuit boards are typically only something you’d find in a digital watch. However, as [IndoorGeek] demonstrates, you can put them to wonderful use in a classical analog watch, too. They can make the perfect watch dial!
Here’s the thing. A printed circuit board is fundamentally some fiberglass coated in soldermask, some copper, maybe a layer of gold plating, and with some silk screen on top of that. As we’ve seen a million times, it’s possible to do all kinds of artistic things with PCBs; a watch dial seems almost obvious in retrospect!
[IndoorGeek] steps through using Altium Designer and AutoCAD to layout the watch face. The guide also covers the assembly of the watch face into an actual wrist watch, including the delicate placement of the movement and hands. They note that there are also opportunities to go further—such as introducing LEDs into the watch face given that it is a PCB, after all!
It’s a creative way to make a hardy and accurate watch face, and we’re surprised we haven’t seen more of this sort of thing before. That’s not to say we haven’t seen other kinds of watch hacks, though; for those, there have been many. Video after the break.
usually I have to speed up audio to compensate for the narration rate…. not here.
If I did this, I’d be tempted to put some small LEDs on it, and add a button crown to the case to light them up. Or maybe have some internal slots routed through, to expose any gearing in the top of the movement.
I like your routed through slots idea. The routed slots could be minimal to expose the gears inside or have a design incorporating the gears. Selecting different movements would provide different amount of gear exposure.
The possibilities are almost endless!!
Please… “wheels”, not gears…
No matter how many clock people call them wheels and pinions and such, they don’t stop matching the definition of a gear. They just have an alias as the other things.
So…
No wonder when I try to “talk shop” with horologist(sp?),
they’ve already “outed me” because I used a form of the word “gear” at the onset.
[Sigh!]
B^)
The only wheels between the dial and the front plate are the motion works. You’d need appropriate slots in the front plate to see anything more interesting like the balance or the pallet forks.
Do the opposite of LEDs. Make it solar-powered.
I think my comment was lost rather than deleted; in summary I think solar is a great thing for a watch because unless you want a wristwatch for appearances, the utility compared to using a phone is in being convenient and always functional. So with solar, it’s even more available and functional, since the batteries won’t be dead.
Hmm. I guess it would be a step too far to put a coil on the watch face, to make it compatible with some inductive chargers?
If you add holes at the 12 hour markers, LEDs facing upwards through them, then add something decorative on top, that would make a nice alternative to glow in the dark markings.
A nice alternative to radium lit dials? Crazy talk. :)
This movement can’t use inductive charging. It is all mechanical.
Just add a tiny motor to the wind up mechancs and drive it with the charging coil 😉
Modern lum isn’t Radium.
Holes? Why not SMD LEDs?
Altium cloud? No thanks.
Similar idea from earlier this year:
https://hackaday.com/2024/03/07/fabbing-a-fab-new-watch-face/
I was sure I’d seen this not-that-long-ago.
I was also too lazy to search for it myself.
I don’t really like the accuracy of the silkscreen for such fine work.
But you could use the accurate layer (the copper) to get multiple colors by doing a bit of post processing: masking off some of the copper and electroplating the rest could get you a different color like chrome/nickel. Even doing some manual tinning of some parts could yield some interesting results.
Could this be taken to the next step as a challenge ? The PCB watch face is beautiful but what functional circuitry can be put on the PCB under the watch hands that would still keep the aesthetics ?