This ESP32 Pico Wristwatch Has Plenty Of Potential

February 12, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 12 Comments

First hand-built prototype. Nurse! isopropyl alcohol, stat!

Prolific hacker [Sulfuroid] is a medical doctor by day, and an electronics hobbyist by night, and quite how he finds the time, we have no idea.

The project we want to highlight is an ESP32 based LED smart watch, which we’ll sure you’ll agree, looks pretty nicely developed so far, and [Sulfuroid] has bigger plans, as you may find, when you dig into the GitHub repo. This analog-style design uses four groups of 0603-sized LEDs, arranged circularly to indicate the passage of time, or anything else you fancy. Since there are four control buttons, a pancake vibration motor, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the possibilities are endless.

In order to stand a hope of driving those 192 LEDs from a single ESP32-Pico-D4, it was necessary to use a multiplexed LED driver, courtesy of the Lumissil IS31FL3733 device, which can handle arrays up to 12 x 16 devices. This chip is one to remember, since it has some really nice features, such as global current control to reduce CPU overhead, automatic breathing loops for those fancy fade effects, and even includes a handy open/short detection function, so it can report back assembly problems, assisting in reworking your dodgy soldering!

Power and interfacing are taken care of via USB-C, with a TP4054 single Li-Ion cell charger chip handling the battery. This is a Taiwanese clone of the popular LTC4054, but that chip may be a bit hard to get at the moment. There is the common-as-muck CP2104 USB chip dealing with the emulated serial port side of things, since for some reason, the ESP32 still does not support USB. The Pico-D4 does have RTC support, but [Sulfuroid] decided to use a DS3231M RTC chip instead. We noticed the touch functionality wasn’t broken out – that could be added easily in the next revision!

We’ve covered watches a lot, because who doesn’t want custom geek-wear! Here’s a slick one, a fun one with the brains on display, and finally one using charlieplexing to get the component count down.

LED Matrix Watch Is The Smart Watch We Didn’t Know We Wanted

December 4, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 17 Comments

[Mile] put together this stunning LED matrix watch, on which the stars of this show are the 256 monochrome 0603 LEDs arranged in a grid on its face. The matrix is only 1.4in in the diagonal and is driven by a combination of an LED driver and some shift registers. The brain is an ATmega328p. We appreciate the extra effort taken to add a USB to UART adapter so the mega can be programmed over USB. It also contains all the necessary circuitry to charge and maintain the lithium battery inside safely.

Input into the device is done with a hall effect sensor which keeps the build from having any moving parts. The body is a combination of 3D printed parts and really fetching brass details connecting to the band.

If it weren’t over the top enough the build even has an ambient light sensor so the display can dim or brighten depending. We bet [Mile] is pretty proud to wear this on their wrist.

Get Your Tweets Without Looking

December 22, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 5 Comments

Head-mounted displays range from cumbersome to glass-hole-ish. Smart watches have their niche, but they still take your eyes away from whatever you are doing, like driving. Voice assistants can read to you, but they require a speaker that everyone else in the car has to listen to, or a headset that blocks out important sound. Ignoring incoming messages is out of the question so the answer may be to use a different sense than vision. A joint project between Facebook Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a solution which uses the somatosensory reception of your forearm.

A similar idea came across our desk years ago and seemed promising, but it is hard to sell something that is more difficult than the current technique, even if it is advantageous in the long run. In 2013, a wearer had his or her back covered in vibrator motors, and it acted like the haptic version of a spectrum analyzer. Now, the vibrators have been reduced in number to fit under a sleeve by utilizing patterns. It is being developed for people with hearing or vision impairment but what drivers aren’t impaired while looking at their phones?

Patterns are what really set this version apart. Rather than relaying a discrete note on a finger, or a range of values across the back, the 39 English phenomes are given a unique sequence of vibrations which is enough to encode any word. A ~~phenome~~ phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of speech. The video below shows how those phonemes are translated to haptic feedback. Hopefully, we can send tweets without using our hands or mouths to upgrade to complete telepathy.

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Homebrew Wrist Brace Helps Beat Injury With Style

February 14, 2018 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

Repetitive motion injuries are no joke, often attended by crippling pain and the possibility of expensive surgery with a lengthy recovery. Early detection and treatment is the key, and for many wrist and hand injuries such as [ktchn_creations] case of “Blackberry thumb,” that includes immobilization with a rigid brace.

Sadly, the fiberglass brace her doctor left her with was somewhat lacking in the style department, and rather than being left with something unappealing to wear for half a year, she 3D-printed a stylish and functional wrist immobilizer. Starting in Autocad, she designed the outline of the brace, essentially an unwrapped version of the splint she started with. For breathability as well as aesthetics, a pattern of tessellated hexagons was used. The drawing was then exported to Fusion 360 for modeling and printing in black PLA. We were surprised to see that the brace was printed flat and later heat formed around her wrist, but that makes more sense than printing it in its final wrapped state. With a few velcro straps, the thermoformed brace was ready for service on the long road to recovery.

While [ktchn_creations] stipulates that looks were the motivator here, we’re not unaware that a 3D-printed brace might be more affordable than something dispensed by a doctor. But if you do build your own DIY appliance, whether for bracing your wrist, your knee, or your wayward teeth, you’ll want to run it past your health care provider, of course.

Be The Firebender You Want To See In The World

August 1, 2017 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Always wanted to be a citizen of Fire Nation? Here’s one way to ace the citizenship exam: punch-activated flaming kung fu gauntlets of doom.

As with all the many, many, many flamethrower projects we’ve featured before, we’ve got to say this is just as bad an idea as they are and that you should not build any of them. That said, [Sufficiently Advanced]’s wrist-mounted, dual-wielding flamethrowers are pretty cool. Fueled by butane and containing enough of the right parts for even a minimally talented prosecutor to make federal bomb-making charges stick, the gauntlets each have an Arduino and accelerometer to analyze your punches. Wimpy punch, no flame — only awesome kung fu moves are rewarded with a puff of butane ignited by an arc lighter. The video below shows a few close calls that should scare off the hairy-knuckled among us; adding a simple metal heat shield might help mitigate potential singeing.

Firebending gloves not enough to satisfy your inner pyromaniac? We understand completely.

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Fail Of The Week: Good Prosthetic Hand Design Goes Bad

July 28, 2017 by Dan Maloney 31 Comments

Is this a case of a good design gone wrong in the build phase? Or is this DIY prosthetic arm a poor design from the get-go? Either way, [Will Donaldson] needs some feedback, and Hackaday is just the right place for that.

Up front, we’ll say kudos to [Will] for having the guts to post a build that’s less than successful. And we’ll stipulate that when it comes to fully articulated prosthetic hands, it’s easy to fail. His design is ambitious, with an opposable thumb, fingers with three phalanges each, a ball and socket wrist, and internal servos driving everything. It’s also aesthetically pleasing, with a little bit of an I, Robot meets Stormtrooper look.

But [Will]’s build was plagued with print problems from the start, possibly due to the complex nature of the bosses and guides within the palm for all the finger servos. Bad prints led to creaky joints and broken servos. The servos themselves were a source of consternation, modified as they were for continuous rotation and broken apart for remotely mounting their pots in the hand’s knuckles. The video below relates the tale of woe.

There’s a lot to admire with [Will]’s build, but it certainly still has its issues. He’s almost to the point of other more successful DIY hand builds but just needs a little help. What say you in the comments line? Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Good Prosthetic Hand Design Goes Bad” →

Arduino Meets Da Vinci In A Gesture-controlled Surgical Robot

June 16, 2016 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

Lots of us get to take home a little e-waste from work once in a while to feed our hacking habits. But some guys have all the luck and score the really good stuff, which is how these robotic surgical tools came to be gesture controlled.

The lucky and resourceful hacker in this case is one [Julien Schuermans], who managed to take home pieces of a multi-million dollar da Vinci Si surgical robot. Before anyone cries “larcency”, [Julien] appears to have come by the hardware legitimately – the wrist units of these robots are consumable parts costing about $2500 each, and are disposed of after 10 procedures. The video below makes it clear how they interface with the robot arm, and how [Julien] brought them to life in his shop. A quartet of Arduino-controlled servos engages drive pins on the wrist and rotates pulleys that move the cables that drive the instruments. A neat trick by itself, but when coupled with the Leap Motion controller, the instruments become gesture controlled. We’re very sure we’d prefer the surgeon’s hands on a physical controller, but the virtual control is surprisingly responsive and looks like a lot of fun.

When we talk about da Vinci around here, it’s usually in reference to 3D printers or a Renaissance-style cryptex build. Unsurprisingly, we haven’t featured many surgical robot hacks – maybe it’s time we started.

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