Watchy, an Arduino powered wrist computer

Watchy. © Squarofumi.

Watchy is a smartwatch with an e-paper screen whose design and software is open-source. Built around an ESP32 SoC, Watchy has a monochrome, 1.54-inch, 200x200 display, 4 buttons, and a 3-axis accelerometer with movement sensor. It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE, to connect to APIs on the Internet and download data (for example, the weather, news, traffic, maps, Spotify, etc.). The battery can last up to 7 days. The ESP32 enjoys a large user base and offers a variety of development options (Arduino, Micropython, ESP-IDF, Zephyr-RTOS, etc.) Watchy comes with comprehensive documentation and examples of Arduino code that illustrate each hardware feature. New watch faces and examples of code are constantly being added to the GitHub repository. You can buy it preassembled for USD45 or build it from scratch: the KiCAD and Gerber files are available on GitHub, along with 3D models.

⇨ The Verge, Mitchell Clark, “Hack together your own e-paper smartwatch with this $50 open-source kit.”

2021-01-13