I made a smart watch from scratch

https://m.imgur.com/a/FSBwD3g

by mnem • 7 years ago

1451 215 7 years ago

m.imgur.com

I would have been impressed with anything functional, but to me this actually looks nicer than the vast majority of commercially produced smart watches. Awesome!

blinky1456• 7 years ago

The Samsung smart watches look really nice to me, I don't know how decent they are in real life though since I don't own one.

learc83• 7 years ago

Just got a Galaxy watch Sunday. So far I like it a lot. The rotating bezel is by far the best feature compared to other smart watches.

asaddhamani• 7 years ago

Right now they're very gimmicky, Apple watch has a much better app ecosystem

parthdesai4• 7 years ago

While it's not a proper smartwatch, i find withings' (Nokia) hybrid smartwatch[0] to be really aesthetically pleasing.

[0] https://www.withings.com/ca/en/steel-hr

michaelmior2• 7 years ago

Agreed. I don't have one either, but the photos look great.

praneshp• 7 years ago

I had a gear S for 2 years before I gave it away recently. The look attracted some positive comments, and the rotating bezel was a favorite of mine.

Anything software was shit (ie poorly done/buggy), and samsung used a lot of dark patterns (you have to install an app to get the watch paired, which is fair, but it keeps nagging you to install a second app).

My friend and I were one of the first batch of people to get it (preorder a few months before release), and had some issues initially that they quickly resolved (by sending us new watches)

azhenley• 7 years ago

Looks good. Time for you to do a Kickstarter!

dan1234• 7 years ago

Here’s the Reddit thread with more feedback from the creator[0]. Amazingly gets a week between charges[1]

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...

[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...

iscrewyou• 7 years ago

Thank you for including old in the reddit url!

def_true_false• 7 years ago

If you use https-everywhere, you can just make a custom rule -- click "Add a rule for this site" in the extension popup and fill this in:

  Matching regex
  ^https://www\.reddit\.com/
  Redirect to
  https://old.reddit.com/

ghostbrainalpha3• 7 years ago

What does adding "old" do?

adriansky3• 7 years ago

Non-old Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...

tboerstad2• 7 years ago

This is nicely done, beautiful aesthetics. There are multiple phases (HW, SW, Mechanics) which would be impressive enough on their own. Kudos!

Love the little gifs to explain how it's done, especially the stenciling of the PCB.

I'm curious, how/why did you choose the DA14683 chip?

tboerstad2• 7 years ago

Quoting the OP from the reddit thread:

"I picked the MCU for a couple of reasons:

-Very low power transmit/receive for the bluetooth (<4mA). I get around a week of battery life

-Cheap

-High speed on the SPI bus. The display writes are limited by the SPI bus. It requires a 9-bit word (additional bit is used for data/command). So being able to run the SPI bus at 48MHz is clutch.

-Has PMIC integrated into chipset. I don't need to include additional circuitry for a buck-boost regulator or a lipo charger since the dialog part has it all built in!

-Cheap"

aw3c22• 7 years ago

Bottom images seem photoshopped.

tyingq• 7 years ago

You mean the ones he specifically says are "rendered"? He mentions Fusion 360, the CAD software he designed the case in.

aw3c22• 7 years ago

Ouch, stupid me. Sorry.

jordan_clark2• 7 years ago

I googled and added it up (just out of curiosity) using the BOM, and total cost was ~$88USD (not counting shipping)

Also, the OS is FreeRTOS (Open sourced by AWS/Amazon in '17) if anyone is interested

naraic0o2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure FreeRTOS has been open source since its inception in 2003, see posts going back to 2004 at [0].

Amazon forked it, merged their fork with the original project and took over it in 2017. You can read about it here [1].

[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/freertos/news/

[1] https://freertos.org/FAQ_Amazon.html

EDIT: actually, I don't think they fully merged their fork as there's a variant called a:freeRTOS

moftz2• 7 years ago

FreeRTOS was previously GPLv2 with a couple of added clauses (anything linked with FreeRTOS is now GPL too and you can't publish performance metrics without approval). I'd imagine there were a lot of companies not wanting to GPL everything they made with FreeRTOS (i.e. Amazon) so with a new MIT license, anyone can do whatever they want.

closetohome• 7 years ago

Or like $6800 depending on how you value your time.

jordan_clark2• 7 years ago

Very true

umvi• 7 years ago

Or like $400,000+ if you are hiring a team of mechanical, electrical and software engineers to design an make it for you because neither you nor any individual on your team has his entire set of skills.

Or like $1,000,000+ if you are hiring some company to design and build it for you

jacquesm• 7 years ago

Fortunately for the OP that's not how he thought about this. People who put a value on their time for everything are invariably terrible company for anything that is fun, will teach you something or that is useful to others rather than only immediately to themselves.

tty23003• 7 years ago

OP obviously enjoys building and showing stuff off. If they valued their time they would be building smart watches instead of mindlessly browsing social media or watching TV.

24gttghh• 7 years ago

Plus the... holy crap that 3D printer is only $170?

moreentropy• 7 years ago

The CCCamp 2019 badge will be a (low cost) smart watch called card10:

https://gitlab.hamburg.ccc.de/card10/logix

okso• 7 years ago

Awesome, thanks for the info !

kkarakk3• 7 years ago

how do you interact with anyone presenting at/participating in CCC? does everyone just meet on day of? i have a hard time reading any of their material and there's never any links on who to ask questions to. OR do they just like it that way

diimdeep• 7 years ago

Tony Stark level DIY

logicallee2• 7 years ago

yeah very impressive. Is this how products are really prototyped? I feel he could have mentioned either 20 years of experience in all parts of this field (if that's how come he could do it so cleanly) or if he did actual prototyping steps he could have mentioned them or showed some pictures. From the pictures, it comes off as something anyone can do in a week or two. like building a table.

Maybe I'm wrong and the pictures do do the process justice?

Either way definitely amazing.

ramses0• 7 years ago

The physical assembly would likely be a week if you're following instructions and avoiding other people's mistakes.

The person who made it probably made a lot of mistakes that you're not seeing, and is used to working at this level of quality.

You could imagine this whole thing started on a breadboard and IDE at some point, but the final assembly is "print the things that I drew on the computer, glue and screw together".

blihp• 7 years ago

It's pretty clear the author knows what they're doing and pretty much anytime I see a post like this I assume they are (smartly) doing some self-marketing rather than a 'see how easy/cool this project is?' So it's part 'look at this nice watch I made' and part 'look at what I could be doing for your product'. Far better than just saying 'designed and built a smart watch' on the resume.

ConfusedDog• 7 years ago

I was expecting a brick on wrist, but this surprised me! And the circuit looks simple. I love the charging dock and textual of the watch frame! Screen resolution is a bit low though. I'd join if there's an open source community dedicated to work on this stuff, I think there's a lot of room improve the OS and software. I'm glad to have seen this!

swalladge• 7 years ago

I was expecting a brick on wrist, but this surprised me!

Agreed, I can't believe how thin and professional it is! This has to be the most mind blowing thing I've seen for a long time. :O

taoufix• 7 years ago

I clicked thinking, this is just a guy who'll disassemble a smartwatch and put his DIY housing and strap on it.

But man! I was so wrong, and I'm totally impressed.

magashna• 7 years ago

I'm annoyed that he made a watch from scratch and its wrist twist to show screen timing is still faster than my smartwatch

bicx• 7 years ago

What they don't show is how often it turns on when he doesn't want it to. That was probably a tough calibration to make for other manufacturers, especially when production smartwatches have much higher-resolution screens and processors that drain battery.

alphakappa• 7 years ago

That is absolutely correct. Figuring out when the watch is in an upright position is trivial. Figuring out whether the user intended to actually get it to turn on is extremely hard, and it involves looking at the history of motion that preceded it, and making judgments based on a whole lot of user data.

The other problem is making the tradeoff between detecting this fast enough (to turn on all the systems that follow so that the screen can light up fast enough) and waiting long enough (so you can be extra sure that the user intended to look at the screen)

The garden path is easy. Making it work mostly unobtrusively is very hard.

TeMPOraL2• 7 years ago

I'm guessing Android watch? That's what you get from running Android on a device.

jshowa3• 7 years ago

This is crazy.

scoutt2• 7 years ago

The DA14683 is fantastic. I played a bit with an eval. board and it's really good for it's price vs. features (~$3 for 250 pcs. at Mouser). But soon the idea of releasing code for it as Open Source faded away, since you need to sign an SLA (https://support.dialog-semiconductor.com/connectivity/reques...), that limits the way source code based on their in SDK is released (only to your customer, in an only “need to know” basis). I hate when this happens.

I wonder how the creator of this watch managed to publish the source code, including the Dialog SDK; if there is a backdoor I am missing.

opencl3• 7 years ago

Probably by ignoring the license.

echlebek• 7 years ago

Pretty reasonable way to solve this problem really. Are they really going to bring the hammer down on a hobbyist?

Sidnicious• 7 years ago

Does anyone know how this compares to the nRF5x series (and/or other BLE-friendly microcontrollers)?

jpablo• 7 years ago

It does look very similar to the nrf52 line. The nrf52850 even has double the SRAM (256kb).

undecisive• 7 years ago

As I understand it, the designer used freertos. At that point, he can just give a readme with hand-wavey "get sdk, install freertos, find firmware files here... and here's all my code which I'm free to license as I wish" and no license infringement necessary. Not sure why a backdoor is needed, but then I've never built a project like this.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 7 years ago

HN needs to know; it's a front door.

gabriel34• 7 years ago

For open source community projects a better bet than a bespoke case would be aiming for the form factor a a popular watch movement, so that hackers can chose to buy or build a bespoke case.

scoutt2• 7 years ago

Removed SDK files at request of Dialog Semiconductor

https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC/commit/12b4ad3...

SnowingXIV• 7 years ago

This is really cool and as a software guy the electrical engineering component is a huge black box to me. Circuit boards all connected up and getting a physical device to handle lithium ion batteries to properly charge and not blow up is beautiful. He does a great job with pictures, videos, and giving detail at both a high level and semi-in-depth explanations really made it shine.

Is there anyone that does similar type of posts? Or even a follow along type of deal to get feet wet with actually building devices (maybe it includes a list of items to buy first)? Don't get me wrong I love writing software but showing someone something you physically made as opposed to sending a link to a website seems so much more satisfying.

TheHideout• 7 years ago

While I didn't give super detailed instructions, I posted something similar for a cyberpunk face-shield prop I made [0]. I started with a cheap VR toy and pretty much everything else is from Adafruit.

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/JOnd3H1

chli• 7 years ago

While it's definitely satisfying to interact with the physical world it also means that sometime you're debugging your software issues (which might be hardware ones), using output signals connected to an oscilloscope or a logic analyser (once you have exhausted the blinking LEDS options...) !

chc4• 7 years ago

Some people at CERN made a smartwatch for a colleague's retirement a number of years ago. Their entire project is FOSS, complete with a talk at FOSDEM 2015. It's not quite a tutorial or walk through, might be interesting for you.

https://www.ohwr.org/project/f-watch/wikis/Home

foldor• 7 years ago

I'm still disappointed that new smart watch development has seemingly stalled in progress as of late. I was hoping that by this time we'd have watches that had 24 hour battery life, and an always on display that didn't need a flick of the wrist to activate. I hoped that wouldn't be asking for much, but I guess it's harder than I assumed.

TeMPOraL2• 7 years ago

That thing unfortunately seems to have died with Pebble.

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

Amazfit is the closest player to Pebble's old space. I don't think they have any 3rd party app ecosystem at all, but the baseline experience covers time, notifications, workout tracking, and a couple other things.

Bip and Stratos are the watchier lines, they also have more minimal Fitbit strap-style product that I forget the name of.

EDIT: Here's another new entry https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/garmin-revamps-entir...

Like most Garmin smartwatches, the Forerunner 45 and 45S track all-day activity and sleep, deliver smartphone alerts to your wrist, and are easy on the eyes thanks to an always-on, sunlight-friendly display. Even though the Forerunner 45 watches are the most affordable of the bunch, they still have a heart-rate monitor and built-in GPS, so users can make outdoor runs without the help of a smartphone.
It can also connect to external sensors like a running dynamics pod and heart-rate chest straps to capture more running data while you train. The Forerunner 245 watches have the same one-week battery life as the Forerunner 45 watches do when in smartwatch mode, but they'll last up to 24 hours in GPS mode or six hours when using GPS and music playback simultaneously.

That looks really promising.

dspillett• 7 years ago

My watch can do 16+ hours with standard GPS (well, after a trail run that took 8 hours pretty much on the dot there was less than half the battery gone based on its readings, I'm extrapolating from there) and there are settings that in theory will extend that a fair bit. The official claim is 20 hours as I use it, 50 with GPS in its least accurate but most power saving configuration (fine for walking, perhaps not for tracking faster locomotion). The 20 on standard settings might be expecting too much, but on reduced accuracy your 24 hours is easily doable. It can go a couple of weeks as a normal watch with ~8 hours of GPS tracked runs, maybe four weeks if I didn't use GPS at all.

Its display is always on too, though the backlight isn't so if you need night-time tracking it won't meet your requirements but otherwise it will.

It isn't top-of-the-range either, or even a brand spanking new model at all (early 2016 release IIRC).

Things have stagnated a bit I'm sure, but mainly because we are hitting to plateaus: one caused by the limits of battery tech & what size/weight we are willing to carry, the other caused by there not being many features left to add, at least not that most users will be willing to pay extra for (or lose battery life in order to support).

jjuel• 7 years ago

I purchased an Amazfit Stratos around 6 months ago. This thing is better than any other smart watch I have owned (Pebble, Moto360, Apple Watch). Always on screen. Multiple days worth of battery. Best workout tracking I have had on a watch. And it does all the notification and smart watch type things I expect. I am not certain why Apple, Samsung, et al haven't figured these things out yet, but other companies have and it is great. Oh let's not forget this only cost me $150.

opencl3• 7 years ago

Even my 3 year old Zenwatch 2 lasts over 24 hours with an always on screen. Watches like the Amazfit Bip last close to a month with an always on screen.

Maarten88• 7 years ago

I have a Garmin Fenix 5 that has this and lasts 2 weeks on a charge.

https://explore.garmin.com/fenix/

tambourine_man• 7 years ago

My first reaction when I read the title was to complete the sentence in my mind: “…and it sucks”.

But I'm very glad I was wrong in my scepticism. This is freaking amazing on so many levels.

Edit: It’s been a while since I’ve been so excited about a project. Now I can’t work just thinking of taking a month off to play with this thing :)

adriansky3• 7 years ago

Do it! What would you build if you take a month off?

harias• 7 years ago

Not OP, but I would build a better CRM. The present solutions are far from intelligent.

justaj• 7 years ago

Not OP, but I wouldn't currently be able to build much of use, so I'll probably be busy learning.

zaarn2• 7 years ago

Considering there is still no good replacement for my Pebble Time, I might use this manual to build my own. The Rebble team might also be interested in this.

scottydelta• 7 years ago

I have been looking for a replacement since the day Fitbit shutdown the pebble services. I am glad that Rebble team took over some of the services but it would still be nice to find a replacement. what do you think of wearOS based devices like fossil sport or Ticwatch pro?

I have been looking at this wiki to identify a few good replacements to pebble time: https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOS/wiki/watches

zaarn2• 7 years ago

I'm not a fan of any of the sports-focused replacement watches that seem to compete against the Pebbles. The Fossil Sport seems to lack a eInk Display and the vendor only promises 24 hour battery time.

The TicWatch seems to manage 40 Hours, something which my recently Pebble Time with a half dead battery achieved.

The main reason I'm severely disappointed in the market is the lack of long battery lifetime devices. And those that do run for a week on a single charge usually lack in other parts of the product.

And after all that, it's all so expensive. A Pebble Time costs around 60€ to 80€ used on Ebay, and that is after they went out of production. Most competitors don't go that low!

StavrosK5• 7 years ago

What a great project! I love how much attention to detail he put in. Fantastic, this is exactly the kind of thing I love studying and working on myself.

Sidenote, I'm a bit disappointed that people use imgur to showcase their projects, as I don't think it's very good for that. I built https://www.makerfol.io/ for this exact purpose but people seem to still prefer imgur for some reason, and I'm not sure why :/

therealidiot• 7 years ago

Just a heads up but your terms and conditions link doesn't work

StavrosK5• 7 years ago

Oh oops, thanks for letting me know! I'll fix that ASAP.

OJFord• 7 years ago

people seem to still prefer imgur for some reason, and I'm not sure why :/

To be brutally honest: because it's more likely to still be there in x years, for any value of x.

Of course if you _really_ care, you host it yourself, and then it exists for as long as you care. Imgur's an easy happy middleground though, so people use it.

frenchy3• 7 years ago

FYI, the gravatar images don't load on my browser because I have Firefox's content blocker enabled. The alt-text "The user's avatar" is showing in a bunch of places, and on the project list it overlaps with the project titles. I'd recommend:

* Replacing "The user's avatar" at the top with the user's name. * On the project list, just setting the alt-text to "".

Otherwise: nice site.

StavrosK5• 7 years ago

Ah, thank you, but removing the alt-text would be bad for accessibility. It is meant for visually impaired people, after all. Maybe setting the title would fix this, I'll look into it, thank you!

stonogo• 7 years ago

Imgur doesn't ask me for my email address out of the gate.

In fact, I've used imgur for years and I don't have an account.

p1esk• 7 years ago

Be sure to read the comments on imgur, made my day :)

vkaku• 7 years ago

It's interesting to know how one can build the one thing for about ~$80 even in small quantities, and everything is available, incl Source.

If people started selling the pre-soldered board as a smart-watch starter kit on Aliexpress , pretty sure someone would buy it.

This is the sort of thing that would make DIY popular, I can see why.

js23• 7 years ago

We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways.

josefresco• 7 years ago

But for about $90 in parts

Oh and I don't know, about $250K worth of professional experience and skills but yeah.. we have.

mhb• 7 years ago

And a dollar for the piece of chalk.

glitcher• 7 years ago

And if you had zero of the tools and equipment beforehand used in the process, what would the additional cost be to just get started?

davidzweig• 7 years ago

You can literally learn all the required skills for $0 (Youtube, online lectures, personal projects).. and a few years of your life.

dotancohen2• 7 years ago

My ten year old daughter recently built a robot that finds a face and then applies blush. We used an old printer for parts, a blush brush, and an Arduino clone. That's $3 in parts. She also had no prior experience with the Arduino or C, though she knows a bit of Python.

That is the level of technology that we are at today. We are living in the future. And it is a future that Asimov would like.

njepa• 7 years ago

While I can appreciate the sentiment, the reason we can do things like this is because of all the research and development that went into things like integrated circuits, manufacturing and CAD. This is more the classic hacker thing, were you use something larger and serious for you own purposes. Not making something primarily for serving ads, or whatnot.

This technology can very well, and was to a large extent made to, be used for something else. I don't think researchers or EEs are stepping over homeless people more than anyone else. When it comes to doing good things with electronics I would be more worried about patents, or just finding the time.

js23• 7 years ago

all the research and development that went into things like integrated circuits, manufacturing and CAD

It's more than just that though. Centuries of incremental knowledge passing from one generation to the next. A global economy that allows chips manufactured in China to be shipped to American for peanuts. All the collaborative effort that went into writing an OS that's available for anyone to use free of charge. That someone is able to be so specialized, they can do this in their leisure time.

It is an incredible amount of human cooperation and achievement over thousands of years. I suppose you could say that about many things today, but for whatever reason, this watch put me in a bit of a philosophical mood.

I guess: humans collaborating achieve great things; we should do more of that.

(You know what else reliably gets me marveling about humanity? Attending a symphony orchestra performance.)

jonatron• 7 years ago

Homeless, poverty, cancer, or war are all people problems, and people are complicated. We do have flying cars but they're not very good at flying or driving.

freehunter2• 7 years ago

The “we don’t have flying cars” argument always strikes me as begging for something to complain about. We could easily have flying cars if there was literally one reason to have a flying car. There is not a single reason to have a flying car, so no one has put in the time to make one because no one would buy it because it’s pointless.

ghostbrainalpha3• 7 years ago

I agree but would also add that poverty is sort of a moving goal post, so I don't know if it will ever be completely eradicated.

otikik• 7 years ago

Computer problems are also people problem. The subsection of computer problems which are interesting to humans at least.

drewg123• 7 years ago

With credit reports and landlord background checks, I think homelessness will be a rising problem because everything now goes into a database that sticks with you for 7 years.

I have an acquaintance who was evicted (due to property damage caused by her ex boyfriend). She was given a 3 day notice to vacate, and now she has an eviction on her record. The eviction basically means that she cannot rent a property in her own name for the next 7 years, even though she's gainfully employed and can pay rent. After over a month living in a hotel, she finally found an off-lease sublet. But that's only temporary.

undefined1• 7 years ago

Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy... If you could choose any point in human history to be born, you'd be best off choosing today.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts...

https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...

axiom92• 7 years ago

A book that echoes the sentiment: https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Pr...

It's an amazing read as well, much like Pinker's other works.

lsiebert• 7 years ago

I think William Gibson say something like, "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed."

We have made great strides, but in the U.S. social mobility is lower now, life expectancy is down, so if you have to be born to a poor family, being born earlier might be better.

MuffinFlavored• 7 years ago

Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy...

What great strides do you think America/the developed world have left to make?

sizzle• 7 years ago

How would the world be today if the government pulled all the brightest engineers off working on optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies and paid them equally to solve these larger societal problems such as homelessness, reversing climate change/pollution, solving cancer, creating unlimited nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels, terraforming Mars for the humans, etc? I can only wonder... Thoughts?

m463• 7 years ago

I like the book "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley which covers a broad range of topics like these.

Some observations are quite surprising, for example using coal and then oil for energy replaced huge amounts of manual labor and might have eliminated slavery, deforestation and hunting whales for whale oil.

steve918• 7 years ago

We've possessed the technology and resources to solve the first two for at least a decade, but it's unclear how doing so would increase share-holder value.

nkrisc• 7 years ago

And when we're piloting spacecraft between various colonies in our solar system, we'll still have wars and poverty and suffering, but one person will be able to design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke nuclear reactor for their personal spacecraft.

mensetmanusman2• 7 years ago

Homelessness: unsolvable in a society where it is illegal to force someone to take care of themselves (by being sheltered). The west has decided that individual freedom is worth the cost of some people using it to choose to be homeless. I think this legal framework will make it impossible to solve homelessness.

Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and objective well being. A majority of millionaires do not think they are rich. I think this psychology will make it impossible to solve poverty.

Cancer: Entropy/cosmic rays scrambling DNA... I think thermodynamics will make it impossible to solve cancer (as in, all cancer) for everyone (very rich with DNA repair therapy in the medium/near future).

War: Actually living now in the most peaceful time in human history as a % of humans in conflict. I think the human desire for power/wealth (again, back to poverty) will make it impossible to solve the zero war scenario. At least nukes scared everyone from the big wars so far :)

c22• 7 years ago

Homelessness: unsolvable in a society where it is illegal to force someone to take care of themselves (by being sheltered). The west has decided that individual freedom is worth the cost of some people using it to choose to be homeless. I think this legal framework will make it impossible to solve homelessness.

This may be philosophically true, and probably even technically true in practice, but I suspect the vast majority of homeless would prefer better shelter than they currently enjoy. For whatever reason, these people have failed to attain better shelter within our societal system. Some people blame the system for letting these people down, other people blame the individual for not having what it takes to "make it", but I don't think you can call this a choice unless you call failure a choice.

Given that, there probably are things we can do to "solve" the vast majority of homelessness, so don't give up just yet. The few people that then legitimately choose to be homeless will probably be so scant as to be barely noticed by the rest of us.

twaddler• 7 years ago

Poverty versus homelessness is an interesting cognitive reframing of the same fundamental problem.

War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of individuals to transcend to rival collectives.

So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth again.

Here’s where I’d like to stop for a moment, and dispense with the conceptual curveballs being tossed around, because now with wealth as a requirement for diamond sure shots against cancer being accessible only to the wealthy, we’re right back onto the homelessness/poverty concept.

I’m going to cut to the chase: the words “illegal to force someone to take care of themselves” is an extremely misguided framing of what homelessness is. Almost to the point of willful deception. That ain’t what homelessness is.

Okay, sure. You’ve got psychiatric, fractured people walking around in circles, and lead a horse to water, do no harm, you’re idea of compelled assistance is my idea of a cage, and what about all the sociopaths who might game the system like blood sucking parasites. Healthy people need not be beset by the lampreys of willful destruction and self destruction.

But.

The U.S. Marshalls and/or the town sheriff’s department will trot on up to my door with cuffs in hand, and guns drawn, within 45 days of my bank telling someone that I haven’t scored enough paper points to pay tribute to the monarch of my roof. So, under threat of violence, not only is the degree of luxury stripped from my permission to simply exist comfortably, but perhaps I land in a cage. A real cage, not a conceptual economic cage of taxes and regulation. A cage shared with some of the fractured psych cases that might fracture me to match their proclivities and better suit their surroundings.

So, poverty. Back to wealth, yes? Points scored on paper, retained by banks that publish scores to highly available, networked computer databases for live transactions and batch processing.

We’re rapidly approaching a situation where electronic systems, computer software, and related hardware applications will obviate human effort in a wide array of scenarios. Transportation, anything involving sorting, organizing and distribution, rote fabrication and assembly; much of that can be automated, with or without magic decision making buzzwords for the edge cases that are currently mechanical turked with brute force data entry by humans in the loop.

This reorganization, centralized around advanced electronic systems of record and authority will drastically improve efficiency, to simultaneously create surplus and idle humans in one stroke, or many, many concurrent strokes, struck within a very fast, short span of time.

Now, broken humans, stupid humans, evil humans, and even just plain old humans, mediocre, unfuckable, and aged out; such a chore to be around and listen to. Why do anything for anyone that can’t charm your pants off? And then, there’s the biosphere to think about. Do we use automation to unleash a surplus of pollution, garbage, waste and toxicity upon our already fragile planet, but for the want of maximizing a bottomless pit of human activity? Indeed, when we play god, and cure cancer, feed the poor and house the homeless, do we even fix the ugly, mean freaks that no one finds adorable or even mildly interesting?

I think we can draw a bounding box around an extrapolation of all living humans in their current state of affairs, and what it would take to raise the standard of living, and provide a comfortable pasture for all the broken shambles of misfortune that creates poverty and all the mental illness that creates homelessness. We’ll probably even have enough surplus to snip out all those pesky tumors, and mend the festering sores that sprout more. We’ll probably be able to figure this stuff out, granted that biology is merely piles of chemistry, which of course is merely piles of physics, and that highly efficient resource sharing will produce idle humans bathed in surplus, many of whom will be pretty smart, healthy and motivated. My, that’s optimistic, isn’t it?

So, I dunno. I don’t see things your way, but then again, I have to spend eight or more exhausting hours a day, on this treadmill of income chasing to pay rent, eat food, run fool’s errands, commute, idle in front of a cathode ray tube, psychically recovering from the trauma of the stupidity inflicted upon me by this shitty mess of a groundhog’s day rat race, and then sleep for eight hours, so I’m actively prevented from helping you solve the problems you attempt to frame as so bloody insurmountable.

C’est la vie...

yomly• 7 years ago

Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and objective well being. A majority of millionaires do not think they are rich. I think this psychology will make it impossible to solve poverty.

I'd argue (and I'm not a millionaire) that being worth less than 10M isn't really that rich. A long-term pet peeve of me is that most people don't realise how poor they are, if you treat everything as being relative.

For most civilians, access to wealth and being able to access debt (and leverage) is tied to house prices, and a lot of house prices in high-paid areas are beyond the reach of most people. Thus, by extension, access to wealth is not easy for most people.

Trying to have access to wealth AND having at least one stay at home full-time parent? Even harder to achieve in this day and age. People born between the 50s and 80s basically were able to both get on the wealth ladder AND afford for one parent to dedicate themselves full-time to parenting their children.

Poiesis• 7 years ago

To save folks a click, copy, and paste, the GitHub project is https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC

pavlov• 7 years ago

That is really lovely — and truly from scratch, including the software!

The first photo looks a lot like Android Wear, so first I assumed this would be using a prepackaged OS, but it isn't!

The source code is in on Github alongside schematics, PCB files and everything else: https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC/tree/master/So...

debt• 7 years ago

How did he get that screen?

Luc• 7 years ago

The part number is in the Bill Of Materials file on his github repo:

https://www.dhgate.com/product/aml130a2402a-1-3-inch-240-240...

qhwudbebd• 7 years ago

Very nice job! I love reading about hardware projects like this but stumble across the write-ups much less frequently/reliably compared to interesting software projects. Are there good groups/lists/sites to hear about more electronic/hardware hacking like this?

linuxftw• 7 years ago

All sorts of interesting projects on Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/

deadelvis• 7 years ago

Congrats! Making it round was a good design decision! Who would think a square (or squircle) watch is good watch design anyway? ;)

polpenn• 7 years ago

How much harder would it be to build an ebook reader?

naraic0o2• 7 years ago

I suppose that depends on your requirements, but people have done similar things: https://orbides.org/book.php

ghostbrainalpha3• 7 years ago

The design of the charger is shockingly good. I would prefer that 10x to my apple charger disk that is constantly slipping off.

mshockwave• 7 years ago

this is REALLY great, i hope i can give two upvotes!

duderific• 7 years ago

I'll take "things people without kids do in their spare time" for 200, Alex.

skummetmaelk3• 7 years ago

"Comments people who wish they were capable of doing such a project make on the internet for 800, Alex"

simias• 7 years ago

Very impressive and inspiring.

I've been thinking about making a custom keyboard for a while now but, while I have no problems with the electronic and software side of things, I'm a bit overwhelmed with the 3D modelling required.

I tried learning Blender but it really feels ill-suited for designing physical objects. The author mentions considering openSCAD but I've heard pretty bad things about it so I haven't really given it a chance yet.

The person making the dactyl keyboard had a very interesting talk where he explain how he basically ended up writing his own DSL in clojure on top of openSCAD, maybe I should try that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4 (if you enjoyed TFA you'll probably like this video as well, it's a step-by-step explanation of how he designed his dream keyboard).

Otherwise I suppose I'll have to betray rms and try this freeware Fusion 360 thing.

allanrbo• 7 years ago

OpenSCAD actually comes pretty natural if you are used to writing code

skummetmaelk3• 7 years ago

OpenSCAD is nice for simple geometry, but products today never have simple geometry. Doing bevels in openSCAD is a nightmare for example, and bevels are everywhere.

gouh• 7 years ago

Blender is more artist-oriented and maybe not the best suited for industrial design. But FreeCAD seems quite powerful and could be a good solution for you

jononor• 7 years ago

FreeCAD is the FOSS equivalent type of tool to Fusion360. Lots of learning material available on YouTube. I have designed wearable electronics / jewelery in it several times.

One can drop down to Python to do code-based parametric there also, with cadquery. But even as a software developer, I have only done that for 2 out of over 100 designs. I have also maybe 2 times used the OpenSCAD importer to include some existing designs as parts into my project.

aceperry• 7 years ago

Great project. I'm amazed at how much you can accomplish with today's tools and services. And using the woodfill PLA is a good way to get around the rough look of 3D printers. Great ideas here.

posterboy• 7 years ago

If you have scratch and junk lying around, why not make a watch from it?

serf• 7 years ago

that's sorta the thinking that makes me take issue from the phrase 'from scratch'.

it's a nice project, but in my vocabulary 'from scratch' doesn't mean "after an initial engineering and design phase i'll order a host of parts from a company', it means 'i'd better start wrapping memory cores, let me get the copper wire out.'

ahmetyas01• 7 years ago

so you are the engineer at google?

Havoc• 7 years ago

Wow - that's an impressive project. Ambitious and well executed.

...only part that had me confused was using like 25% of screen real estate for showing time and putting flowers on the other 75%. Artistic I guess.

kenward• 7 years ago

My guess is he hasn't gotten to scaling the text sizes yet. It looks like all the text is the same font-size.

I think in the Reddit thread, he mentioned having to draw each character (lower-case and upper-case) pixel-by-pixel for the display.

candidera• 7 years ago

Hi guys, how are you?

cssbubble• 7 years ago

This is so awesome. It is a good learning and inspiring for others. I will add this project to DIY section of the Learn-awesome repository https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome. Please add such valuable resources here.

adriansky3• 7 years ago

This is so cool. I've never heard of that microcontroller though. It has nice features and applications. Datasheet of the microcontroller he used: https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/sites/default/files/sma...

srndh• 7 years ago

On a related note, I was reminded of Woz's Nixie watch - https://youtu.be/m4R3hODnTGo

I made a smart watch from scratch

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