Smart Watch Hack Lets You Use Your 3.5mm Headphones With An IPhone 7

September 23, 2016 by James Hobson 54 Comments

As you may have heard, the iPhone 7 is ditching the 3.5 mm headphone jack in the name of progress and courage. Whatever your take on that, it leaves the end user out in the cold if — for instance — their preferred headphones still use the old format. Here to save you from an untimely upgrade is YouTuber [Kedar Nimbalkar], who has modified a Bluetooth Smartwatch to incorporate a 3.5 mm jack to allow continued use your current headphones.

After opening up the smartwatch [Nimbalkar] removes the speaker, solders in a 3.5 mm headphone jack and clips out an opening in the watch’s case that maintains the watch’s sleek exterior.

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Hacklet 123 – Watches

September 3, 2016 by Adam Fabio 22 Comments

Time and tide wait for no man. Chaucer may be right, but a man (or woman) wearing a watch can get ahead of time before it sneaks up on them. People aren’t ever satisfied with just the time though. They want the date, the phase of the moon. [Woz] summed it up pretty well when he said “I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist”. Hackers love watches too, which means there are plenty of watch projects out there. Some of them even tell time. This week we’re looking at some of the best watch projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [Max.K] and Chronio. You might think Chronio looks a bit like the Pebble Time, and you’d be right! [Max] based his design heavily on Pebble’s case design. Pebble even has their CAD files on GitHub, which helped [Max] with his modified, 3D printed version. Chronio is Arduino based, using an ATmega328p microcontroller with the Arduino bootloader. The display is Sharp’s 96×96 pixel Memory LCD. A DS3231 keeps the time accurate, and provides a free temperature sensor. The entire watch is powered by a CR2025 battery. Running a 20uA sleep current, [Max] estimates this watch will last about 6 months on a single battery.

Next we have [Joshua Snyder] and Neopixel pocket watch. Who said a watch has to go on your wrist? [Joshua] brings some steampunk style to the party. His watch uses an Adafruit 12 NeoPixel ring to tell time. Red, blue, and green LEDS represent the hour, minute and second hands. The watch is controlled by an ESP8266. The time is set via WiFi. Between the LEDs and the power-hungry ESP8266, this isn’t exactly a low-power design. A 150mAh LiPo battery should keep things running for a few hours though. That’s more than enough time to make a splash at the next hackerspace event.

Next up is [ipaq3115] and The Pi Watch. Round smartwatches have created a market for round LCD screens. These screens have started to trickle down into the hacker/maker market. [ipaq3115] got his hands on one, and had to design something cool with it. The Pi Watch isn’t powered by a Raspberry Pi, but a Teensy 3.1. [ipaq3115] included the Freescale/NXP Kinetis processor and MINI54 bootloader chip on his own custom board. He used the Teensy’s analog inputs to create his own 10 element capacitive touch ring. This watch even has a LSM303 magnetometer/accelerometer. All this power comes at a cost though. It takes a 480 mAh LiPo battery to keep The Pi Watch Ticking.

Finally we have [Vikas V] and ScrolLED watch. Who says a watch has to have an LCD? [Vikas V] wanted a scrolling LED display on his wrist, so he built his own. An Atmel ATmega88V-10AU controls a 16×5 charlieplexed LED array. [Vikas] included a character font with many of the ASCII symbols in flash, so this watch can display messages. Power comes from a CR2032 watch battery in a custom PCB mounted holder. [Vikas] biggest issue so far has been light leaks from LED to LED. He’s considering mounting the array on the bottom of the watch. Shining the LEDs up through holes in the PCB would definitely help with the light leakage.

If you want to see more watch projects, check out our new watch projects list. Notice a project I might have missed? Don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

DIY Smartwatch Based On ESP8266 Needs Classification

August 12, 2016 by Moritz Walter 20 Comments

Building your own smartwatch is a fun challenge for the DIY hobbyist. You need to downsize your electronics, work with SMD components, etch your own PCBs and eventually squeeze it all into a cool enclosure. [Igor] has built his own ESP8266-based smartwatch, and even though he calls it a wrist display – we think the result totally sells as a smartwatch.

His design is based on a PCB for a wireless display notifier he designed earlier this year. The design uses the ESP-12E module and features an OLED display, LEDs, tactile switches and an FT232R USB/UART interface. Our beloved TP4056 charging regulator takes care of the Lithium-ion cell and a voltage divider lets the ESP8266’s ADC read back the battery voltage. [Igor] makes his own PCBs using the toner transfer method, and he’s getting impressive results from his hacked laminator.

Together with a hand-made plastic front, everything fits perfectly into the rubber enclosure from a Jelly Watch. A few bits of Lua later, the watch happily connects to a WiFi network and displays its IP configuration. Why wouldn’t this be a watch? Well, it lacks the mandatory RTC, although that’s easy to make up for by polling an NTP time server once in a while. How would our readers classify this well-done DIY build? Let us know in the comments!

Easy Bubble Watch Oozes Retro Charm

June 25, 2016 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

[Rafael] made a sweet little retro watch that’s a fantastic introduction to hardware DIY. If you’ve programmed an Arduino before, but you’ve never had a board made, and you are up for some SMD soldering, this might be for you. It’s got some small components, so ease off the coffee before soldering, but it’s nothing that you won’t be able to do. In the end, you’ll have something awesome.

Aesthetically, the centerpiece is the bubble display, which reminds us of the old HP calculator that our parents kept in the junk drawer, long after it had ceased to be relevant. It would return 3.9999999 for the square-root of 16, but we loved to play with it anyway. This watch will let you vicariously reclaim our childhood.

But that’s not all! It’s also an Arduino and RTC clock. Functions that are already implemented include clock, calendar, stopwatch, and “temperature”. (Temperature is from the AVR’s internal thermometer, which isn’t super-accurate and is probably just going to tell you how hot your wrist is anyway…) It’s got buttons, and tons of free flash space left over. It’s begging to be customized. You know what to do.

It’s not a smart watch, but it’s a great project. “The nostalgic retro bubble display is certain to flatter any hacker’s outfit.” Or something. OK, but we want one.

[via OSHpark’s Hackaday.io feed]

Gutting And Rebuilding A Classic Watch

May 30, 2016 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

No, that watch isn’t broken. In fact, it’s better.

[Lukas] got so used to his binary-readout ez430 Chronos watch that when the strap disintegrated he had to build his own to replace it. But most DIY wristwatches are so clunky. [Lukas] wanted something refined, something small, and something timeless. So he shoe-horned some modern components, including an MSP430, into a Casio F-91W watch.

The result is a watch that tells time in binary, has a built-in compass, and with some more work will be updatable through an IR receiver that he also managed to fit in there somehow. Now he has the watch that Casio would make today, if fashion had stayed stuck firmly in the early 1990s. (Or not. Apparently, Casio still makes and sells the F-91W. Who knew?)

Anyway, back to an epic and pointless hack. Have a look at the tiny, tiny board that [Lukas] made. Marvel in the fact that he drove the original LCD screen. Dig the custom Kicad parts that match the watch’s originals. To get an accurate fit for the case, [Lukas] desoldered the piezo buzzer contact and put the board onto a scanner, which is a great trick when you need to get accurate dimensions. It’s all there, and well-documented, in his GitHub, linked above.

All in all, it’s an insane hack, but we love the aesthetics of the result. And besides, sometimes the hacking is its own reward.

Fallout Inspired Cellphone Wristwatch

May 6, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 13 Comments

[Mr. Volt] mentions that some of the commenters on his videos believed that he shouldn’t be making large, retro computer themed communicator watches. He believes they are wrong, naturally we are compelled to agree with him.

In his latest build he has produced a rather well-built and large cell-phone watch. After the untimely death of an Apple II cellphone watch, he decided to up his game and make one that could take more of a beating. The case is 3D printed, which is hard to believe given the good finish. He must have spent a long time sanding the prints. Some wood veneer for looks and aluminum panels for strength complete the assembly.

The electronics are a Teensy and a GSM module. It looks like he places calls by calling the operator since the wrist communicator only has four inputs: a red button, a blue button, and a momentary switch rotary encoder.

The communicator appears to work really smoothly, and it would certainly draw attention to him were he to wear it anywhere other than the Wasteland. Video after the break.

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DIY Arduino Watch

April 21, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 17 Comments

We first thought [Alexis Ospitia]’s watch was a sports watch made with an Arduino, but it’s actually a sporty watch made with an Arduino. This explains the watch’s strange ability to tell you the current temperature and humidity.

The core of the watch is an Arduino Mini. To make it good for time telling, a real-time clock module was added. A DHT11 monitors the temperature and humidity. A charge circuit and lithium battery provide power. Finally, the watch displays the date, time, and other data with an LCD from a Nokia 5110. We can tell you the last part that’s going to break on this.

Even if you think the watch is a bit chunky, the tutorial is very slick. [Alexis] has taken the trouble to individually draw and describe each portion of the watch’s construction. He explains each pin, what they do, and provides a Fritzing drawing of the wires to the Arduino. The code is provided; to program the watch a USB-to-serial module must be used.

For the housing he made a box from a thin gauge aluminum sheet and attached leather straps to the assembly. The final construction is cool looking in a techno-punk way, and is fairly compact. One might even say sporty.