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
PineTime is almost the perfect smartwatch for me. It certainly is the one that comes closes to what I want: open hardware, supports open-source systems and knowing Pine64, they will most likely be selling spare parts too, which would be amazing.
The one thing I’m not a fan of is the form factor. Once development is further ahead, I hope they will have a model with a thinner screen, about the width of the strap, along the lines of this.
I plan on getting a PineTime too but it’s not quite what I really want hardware wise.
My ideal smartwatch would basically be a pebble with open hardware and software. I really prefer a non-backlit sunlight readable display and physical buttons.