In this morning’s IEEE Spectrum Tech Alert, there was a link to an article on Watchy, a $59 hackable smart watch, made by a company called Squarofumi. According to the article:
Watchy is based around an ESP32 microcontroller, a popular alternative to AVR- or Arm-based microcontroller because of its built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities that can be programmed via the Arduino IDE. Surrounding hardware includes a 1.5-inch e-paper display, a real-time clock module, a vibration motor, a three-axis accelerometer, and four control buttons.
Because it’s programmable, you can create your own watch face. The Squarofumi website shows a number of these. Here’s an example of three of them:
Pretty neat, huh? Even neater is that you can program it to tell more than time. The article goes on to say:
Watchy faces can be expanded beyond simply telling the time: The wireless connection and a JSON parser library allow you to extract information from online services about things such as the weather or subway arrival times, and the accelerometer allows for gesture controls.
So, I’m guessing that someone could program it to display the latest propagation data, DX spots, and maybe APRS messages. In addition to using the Arduino IDE to program Watchy, you can also program it with Micropython, ESP-IDF, and Zephyr-RTOS. Get it from CrowdSupply.
Ed KC8SBV says
There is also the Pinetime to be considered for developers
https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/
Jack Vaughan says
This is pretty sharp. How about a Dick Tracy watch? To me that was very futuristic in the past!
Dan KB6NU says
We’re getting ever closer to the Dick Tracy watch.
Frank says
Bought one and assembled it. That was fun, but it went downhill from there. Battery life was awful, barely lasting one day at first and then deteriorating to less than a day of power over the first week of use. Sent an email to Watchy and response was “we’ll get back to you” and after a couple of follow ups on my part no further response. Pretty poor customer service. Can’t even resell it. Programming for amateur radio use is the last thing on my mind. Shame. Nice idea.
Dan KB6NU says
I’m sorry to hear that. It did seem like a really good idea.