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
Being able to give freedom would be nice, but not exploiting people and also not supporting self-exploitation is a start, isn’t it? And yes there are people that refuse to work for Fairphone, but others don’t and it’s worth doing it for them and worth for the alternative that is being built practically but also in minds.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
The best thing we can do is study the Modern Monetary Theory and make the whole world understand that a sovereign State can guarantee full employment and a full welfare for the entire population.