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
$50 for a smartwatch without useful sensors is not cheap!
Not correct it has 3-axis accelerometer with gesture detection. It has connectivity and can be custom programmed etc so it is certainly a smart watch. Pebble also only had these sensors as I recall and cost a lot more. It’s not trying to be an ECG and health monitor, but that all depends on what modules can be put inside.
I didn’t claim that it has no sensors at all. PineTime provides at least accelerometer and heart rate sensor at half the price! For $50 you can find closed-source devices that also measure blood pressure.
https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit/?v=0446c16e2e66
Yes PineTime has a basic heart rate sensor. But we have no idea yet what the cost will be for PineTime as it is not yet available for retail sale.