The binary wristwatch #WearableWednesday

Thanks to Dano for tipping us off to this really cool watch project from Njneer.

I used to get the feeling that it wasn’t obvious enough that I really enjoy working with embedded systems.  I decided to change that by designing a binary timepiece that is portable, easy to use, has long battery life, and has a very barebones “circuits and components” feel to it.  After wearing the final product for about a month now, I feel like I was successful on all of those goals:

I’m pretty proud of this project; the clasp is a ribbon cable that doubles as the programming interface for the PIC microcontroller that drives everything.  The time is displayed with superbright LEDs that are blinding at 15 mA, which means that I’m able to limit the power consumption considerably while still achieving a very readable display.  The watch is powered by the (ever so common and useful) CR2032 lithium coin cell, which gives it an estimated battery life of 3 months depending on usage patterns (still doing research and testing on the average for this… 2 months in and I’m still running on my first battery : )

I like this watch so much that I decided to make some for a few friends of mine.  From there, I figured that since I had gotten to a  point where I could make them without too much difficulty, I might as well sell them to see if I could recoup how much I’ve spent on component testing and PCB fabrication  The completed watch is available at my storenvy page.

Read more about the build here.


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