watch

120 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Health-Monitoring Flexible Smartwatch

July 15, 2017 by 17 Comments

[Nick Ames]’s Flexible Smartwatch project aims to create an Open Source smartwatch made out of a flexible, capacitive e-ink touchscreen that uses the whole surface of the band. This wraparound smartwatch displays information from the on-board pulse and blood oximetry sensor as well as the accelerometer and magnetometer, giving you a clear idea of how stressed you are about your upcoming meeting.

The display [Nick] went with is called an electrophoretic display (EPD). It’s 400×200-pixels at 115ppi with a 4″ diagonal, and can bend around a wrist. It can draw shapes in 16 shades of gray with a refresh time of under a second or B&W with a faster refresh.

The smartwatch described in [Nick]’s project would be 2.5mm thick — certainly thin enough to fit under a sleeve. We suspect that success of the form factor may hinge on [Nick]’s success in making it not look like a hospital wristband. Although this gives us the thought that a biofeedback-sensing smart wristband is probably the future of hospital stays.

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The Smartest Smart Watch Is The One You Make Yourself

March 13, 2017 by 10 Comments

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!

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Building A Replica Of An Ultraluxury Watch

February 14, 2017 by 66 Comments

In the world of late-stage capitalism, unchecked redistribution of wealth to the upper classes has led to the development of so-called ultraluxury watches. Free from any reasonable constraints on material or R&D cost, manufacturers are free to explore the outer limits of the horological art. [Karel] is an aspiring engineer and watch enthusiast, and has a taste for the creations of Urwerk. They decided to see if they could create a replica of the UR202 watch with nothing more than the marketing materials as a guide.

[Karel]’s first job was to create a model of the watch in CAD. For a regular watch this might be simple enough, but the UR202 is no run-of-the-mill timepiece. It features a highly irregular mechanism, full of things like a turbine regulated winding mechanism, telescoping rods instead of minute hands, and tumbling rotors to indicate the hours. The official product sheet bears some of these features out. Through careful analysis of photos and watching videos frame-by-frame, they managed to recreate what they believe to be a functioning mechanical model within their CAD software.

It was then time to try and build the timepiece for real. It was then that [Karel] started hitting some serious stumbling blocks. As a humble engineering student, it’s not often possible to purchase an entire machine shop capable of turning out the tiny, precision parts necessary to make even a basic watch mechanism. Your basic 3D printer squirting hot plastic isn’t going to cut it here. Farming out machining wasn’t an option as the cost would be astronomical. [Karel] instead decided on combining a Miyota movement with a machined aluminum base plate and parts 3D printed using a process known as “Multijet Modelling” which essentially is an inkjet printhead spitting out UV curable polymer.

In the end, [Karel] was able to get just the tumbling hour indicator working. The telescoping minute hand, compressed air turbine winding system, and other features didn’t make it into the build. However, the process of simulating these features within a CAD package, as well as manufacturing a semi-functional replica of the watch, was clearly a powerful learning experience. [Karel] used their passion to pursue a project that ended up giving them a strong grasp of some valuable skills, and that is something that is incredibly rewarding.

We’ve seen others trying to fabricate parts of a wristwatch at home. Keep your horological tips coming in!

[Thanks to Str Alorman for the tip!]

Seiko Spring Drive Movement Being Assembled

Keeping Time With A Spring Powered Integrated Circuit

February 9, 2017 by 16 Comments

Watch aficionados have a certain lust for mechanical watches. These old school designs rely on a spring that’s wound up to store energy. The movement, an intricate set of gears and other mechanical bits, ensures that the hands on the watch face rotates at the right speed. They can be considered major feats of mechanical engineering, with hundreds of pieces in an enclosure that fits on the wrist. They’re quite cheap, and you have to pay a lot for accuracy.

Quartz watches are what you usually see nowadays. They use a quartz crystal oscillator, usually running at 32.768 kHz. These watches are powered by batteries, and beat out their mechanical counterparts for accuracy. They’re also extremely cheap.

Back in 1977, a watchmaker at Seiko set off to make a mechanical watch regulated by a quartz crystal. This watch would be the best of both words. It did not become a reality until 1997, when Seiko launched the Spring Drive Movement.

A Blog To Watch goes through the design and history of the Spring Drive movement. Essentially, it uses a super low power integrated circuit, which consumes only 25 nanowatts. This IC receives power from the wound up spring, and controls an electromagnetic brake which allows the movement to be timed precisely. The writeup gives a full explanation of how the watch works, then goes through the 30 year progression from idea to product.

Once you’ve wrapped your head around that particularly awesome piece of engineering, you might want to jump into the details that make those quartz crystal resonators so useful.

[Thanks to John K. for the tip!]

Plus Size Watch With A Pair Of Tiny Nixies

January 20, 2017 by 10 Comments

When you stuff a pair of Nixie tubes into a wristwatch the resulting timepiece looks a little like Flavor Flav’s necklace. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your taste and if you’re comfortable with the idea of wearing 200 volts on your wrist, of course.

As a build, though, [prototype_mechanic]’s watch is worth looking into. Sadly, details are sparse due to a computer issue that ate the original drawings and schematics, but we can glean a little from the Instructables post. The case is machined out of solid aluminum and sports a quartz glass crystal. The pair of IN-16 tubes lives behind a bezel with RGB LEDs lighting the well. There’s a 400mAh LiPo battery on board, and an accelerometer to turn the display on with a flick of the wrist.

It may be a bit impractical for daily use, but it’s a nicely crafted timepiece with a steampunk flair. Indeed, [prototype_mechanic] shows off a few other leather and Nixie pieces with four tubes that certainly capture the feel of the steampunk genre. For one with a little more hacker appeal, check out this Nixie watch with a 3D-printed case.

Continue reading “Plus Size Watch With A Pair Of Tiny Nixies” →

Micro Radio Time Station Keeps Watch In Sync

December 28, 2016 by 14 Comments

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) broadcasts atomic clock time signals from Fort Collins, Colorado on various frequencies. The WWVB signal on 60 kHz blasts out 70,000 watts that theoretically should reach the entire continental US. Unfortunately for [Anish Athalye], the signals do not reach his Massachusetts dorm, so he built this GPS to WWVB converter to keep his Casio G-Shock self-setting watch on track.

Not a repeater but a micro-WWVB transmitter, [Anish]’s build consists of a GPS receiver module and an ultra low-power 60kHz transmitter based on an ATtiny44a microcontroller’s hardware PWM driving a ferrite rod antenna. It’s not much of a transmitter, but it doesn’t need to be since the watch is only a few inches away. That also serves to keep the build in compliance with FCC regulations regarding low-power transmissions. Heavy wizardry is invoked by the software needed to pull time data off the GPS module and convert it to WWVB time code format, with the necessary time zone and Daylight Savings Time corrections. Housed in an attractive case, the watch stand takes about three minutes to sync the watch every night.

[Anish] offers some ideas for improving the accuracy, but we think he did just fine with this build. We covered a WWVB signal spoofer before, but this build is far more polished and practical.

The Little Mechanism That Made Precise Time-keeping Possible

November 15, 2016 by 60 Comments

There are few things to which we pay as much attention as the passage of time. We don’t want to be late for work, or a date. Even more importantly, we don’t want to age and die. Good time keeping is an all important human activity, and we started to worry about it as soon as we abandoned our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and agriculture and commerce emerged.

By de:Benutzer:Flyout - own work, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Kerzenuhr.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1783765
A candle clock

Measuring time needs two things: a repetitive process to mark equal increments of time, and a way of tracking and displaying the result. The first timekeeping devices relied of course on the movement of the sun. Ancient Egyptians, around 3500 BC, built obelisks that, by casting a shadow on the ground at different positions, gave an approximate idea of the time. Next came the use of some medium that was consumed at a regular pace: candle, incense, water and sand clocks are examples. A great advancement came with the advent of the mechanical clock, and here is where the escapement mechanism appears.

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