DIY Smart Watch Project

I have a rather thin hand; this has made getting watches that fit my hand impossible to find, especially smart watches. They look more like a bangle than a watch on my hand. So being a passionate robotics enthusiast, I decided to make my own watch, as they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention”.

I had a few goals with my project: 1. Was that the watch must be small enough to fit my hand, 2. It should have a long battery life, 3. It should look cool, and not so DIY.

I started my journey by buying a 1.5-inch TFT display, 300 Mah battery, and an esp32. I was quickly able to make some code and was able to make it work. But when I decided to design the watch, I was met with a problem, the watch was too big, this completely defeated the whole purpose of the watch, and I had to find a better solution.

Making things on a larger scale is easier in electronics, but shrinking it down is quite difficult, you are met with problems such as battery being insufficient or the components being too big. This is a problem faced even in the microprocessor industry, where they deal on the atomic scale, and it is physically impossible to make the processor smaller (smaller processors are more efficient).

I started to think on ways to optimize my watch, I downgraded to a smaller monochrome OLED display, which requires way less power than the TFT display; I shrunk the battery to 90 Mah (I was able to do so with the watch lasting longer due to a function called light sleep). These changes made it possible to shrink the watch by 50%.

I then started to solder these tiny wires on to the microcontroller and this was a very frustrating task as the wires must be extremely short to fit and your hands should be as steady as a surgeon. I still persevered and finally was able to start the 3d design, there was a lot of back and forth on designing and manufacturing of the watch case, and overall, I did this over 15 times.

Then came the most important part of the project, the coding. I made 12 versions of code consisting of over 1000 lines of code. I really enjoyed doing this as it brought the project to life.

The final product was a smart watch that is small enough to fit my hand, has many functions such as watch faces, stopwatch, calendar, games, flashlight, and a few settings; with a case that was inspired by the iconic Casio F91-W-1.

Although I covered most of the challenges I faced, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There were many bugs in the code, and challenges such as optimizing the code to reduce space and conserve battery life. This was a very rewarding project, and has taught me about problem solving, optimizing code, designing, and manufacturing.