ATtiny Watch Is Tiny

February 18, 2016 by 27 Comments

[陳亮] (Chen Liang) is in the middle of building the ultimate ring watch. This thing is way cooler than the cheap stretchy one I had in the early 1990s–it’s digital, see-through, and it probably won’t turn [陳]’s finger green.

watch-gutsThe current iteration is complete and builds upon his previous Arduino-driven watch building experiences. It runs on an ATtiny85 and displays the time, temperature, and battery status on an OLED. While this is a fairly a simple build on paper, it’s the Lilliputian implementation that makes it fantastic.

[陳] had to of course account for building along a continuous curve, which means that the modules of the watch must be on separate boards. They sit between the screw bosses of the horseshoe-shaped 3D-printed watch body, connected together with magnet wire. [陳] even rolled his own coin cell battery terminals by cutting and doubling over the thin metal bus from a length of bare DuPont connector.

If you’re into open source watches but prefer to wear them on your wrist, check out this PIC32 smart watch or the Microduino-based OSWatch.

Dumping U8Plus Smartwatch ROM Via Vibration Motor

February 10, 2016 by 24 Comments

[Lee] continues with his exploration of the U8Plus (a cheap smartwatch). He hasn’t got it all cracked, yet, but he did manage to get a dump of the device’s ROM using an unusual method. At first, [Lee] thought that the JTAG interface (or, at least, the pins presumed to be the JTAG interface) would be a good way to explore the device. However, none of the people experimenting with the device have managed to get it to work.

Instead, [Lee] went through the serial bootloader and dumped the flash memory. He found out, though, that the bootloader refused to read the ROM area. It would, however, load and run a program. Unfortunately, no one has found how to access the UART device directly, but they have found how to drive the vibration motor.

[Lee] took off the vibration motor and used it as an output port for a simple program to dump the ROM. An Arduino picked up the data at a low baud rate and produced an output file. This should allow more understanding of how to drive the watch hardware.

We covered the initial teardown of this watch earlier this year. Of course, if you don’t want to reverse engineer a smartwatch, you could always build your own.

Finally, An Acceptable Use Of The Apple Watch

January 23, 2016 by 20 Comments

For many of us, we remember the days of the Apple Classic Macintosh. For [Erich Styger], his days of development in Pascal and Modula-2 are long over, but he still gets warm and tingly thinking back to the classic white box we knew and loved. So he decided to 3D print a Classic Mac to use as his Apple Watch charging station.

He started with an existing model on Thingiverse and modified it to better suit his needs — sharing CAD makes the design process go ever so much faster. It consists of two parts, an outer shell that looks like a Classic Mac, and an inner structure that holds the stock charger for your Apple Watch.

The result is an adorably small Classic Mac to sit on your desk in miniature form. It’s perhaps the most acceptable use of a $1000 Apple Watch we have ever seen.

Seriously though, the Apple Watch is nicely built — just take a look at the tear-down we covered.

Cheap Smartwatch Teardown

January 13, 2016 by 31 Comments

A proper smartwatch can cost quite a bit of money. However, there are some cheap Bluetooth-connected watches that offer basic functions like show your incoming calls, dial numbers and display the state of your phone battery. Not much, but these watches often sell for under $20, so you shouldn’t expect too much.

Because they’re so cheap, [Lee] bought one of these (a U8Plus) and within an hour he had the case opened up and his camera ready. As you might expect, the biggest piece within was the rechargeable battery. A MediaTek MT6261 system on a chip provides the smart part of the watch.

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PIC32 Smart Watch For Less Than A Benjamin

January 10, 2016 by 20 Comments

[Matthew Filipek] likes smart watches, but wanted to build one for under $100, so he did. The watch has a 1.7 inch LCD touchscreen, a rechargeable LiPo battery, an SD card, and Bluetooth. The watch is a little large since [Matthew] had only a month to complete the project that drove him to use some pre-made modules image004and meant one shot at getting his custom PCB right.

The watch sports three applications: a settings app, a simple game, and a sketch program (you can see a demo in the video below). Power management is a primary goal, of course, although the clock rate is held high enough to make the game playable. To simplify the software, [Matthew] uses protothreads–a lightweight thread abstraction for embedded systems.

We’ve seen several DIY smartwatches in the past including one entry for the Hackaday Prize. It is hard to roll your own watch that has the same small size and style as a commercial offering. However, there is something to be said for having a homebrew watch for boosting your hacker cred.

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OSWatch, An Open Source Watch

December 13, 2015 by 18 Comments

If you are a soldering ninja with a flair for working with tiny parts and modules, check out the Open Source Watch a.k.a. OSWatch built by [Jonathan Cook]. His goals when starting out the project were to make it Arduino compatible, have enough memory for future applications, last a full day on one charge, use BLE as Central or Peripheral and be small in size. With some ingenuity, 3d printing and hacker skills, he was able to accomplish all of that.

OSWatch is still a work in progress and with detailed build instructions available, it is open for others to dig in and create their own versions with modifications – you just need to bring in a lot of patience to the build. The watch is built around a Microdunio Core+ board, an OLED screen, BLE112A module, Vibration motor, a couple of LEDs and Buttons, and a bunch of other parts. Take a look at the schematics here. The watch requires a 3V3, 8MHz version of the Microdunio Core+ (to ensure lower power consumption), and if that isn’t readily available, [Jonathan]  shows how to modify a 5V, 16MHz version.

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The Three Week Three Dollar Binary Watch

December 10, 2015 by 9 Comments

There’s a Maker Faire in three weeks, and your group wants to design and build a binary watch to give to attendees. You don’t have much time, and your budget is $3 per watch. What do you do? If you are [Parker@Macrofab] you come up with a plan, buy some parts, and start prototyping.

[Parker] selected the PIC16F527 because it had enough I/O and was inexpensive. A cheap crystal and some miscellaneous discrete parts rounded out the bill of materials. Some cheap ESD straps would serve for a band. He did the prototype with a PICDEM board and immediately ran into the bane of PIC programmers: the analog comparators were overriding the digital I/O pins. With that hurdle clear, [Parker] got the rest of the design prototyped and laid a board out in Eagle.

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