It used to be that building your own watch was either a big project or it meant that you didn’t really care about how something looked on your wrist. But now with modern parts and construction techniques, a good-looking smart watch isn’t out of reach of the home shop. But if you don’t want to totally do it yourself, you can turn to a kit and that’s what Stephen Cass did. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, he took a kit called a Watchy and put it through its paces for you.
With its gray-tinted screen, Squarofumi’s Watchy inevitably conjures echoes of the Pebble smartwatch, which made a huge splash in 2012 when it raised over US $10 million on Kickstarter. Pebble ultimately had its lunch eaten by Apple and others, but Watchy is different in a few key respects: It is not trying to be a mass-market device. It is unashamedly for those willing to tangle with code. It’s also inexpensive — just $50 versus the Pebble’s $150, let alone the Apple Watch’s $400 price tag.
See https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/the-ieee-builds-a-smart-watch/
#technology #hardware #watchy #opensource #smartwatch
No, it’s not about Watchy specifically, but electronics as a whole. Nearly nobody in this industry cares about mineral mining conditions. For this reason I only buy used electronic devices, but if you build something on your own you cannot buy everything used and for many components it is close to impossible to find a manufacturer that uses materials that were mined under at least somewhat fair conditions. Apart from these general social problems what I like about projects like Watchy is that they increase repairability which is a huge ecological problem especially for wearables.
Ah OK I was worried and do not want to give the wrong impression about Watchy if they have no guilt. Really should start a different topic for that then to focus specifically on that issue and maybe list the guilty parties.