DIY Smartwatch: I've got competition!

So it looks as if I'm not the only one looking to design a fun, interactive watch.  A very cool OLED watch was recently featured on Hackaday.  It has all sorts of features crammed into it and looks like was an impressive amount of time and effort put into making it.  Watching a video of the watch in action gave me lots of thoughts about what to implement in my design and reading his write-up gave me a chance to compare my methods and parts against his.  Overall I really like his design and what he did with such little space, and I would ultimately like to achieve the level of detail, quality, and battery life that he did, though with a slightly bigger package.

That being said, my design remained relatively unchanged after looking at his, mainly because we are attempting to accomplish different tasks and most of our circuitry was already similar.  I did update my design to use the navigation button seen on his watch, but that will have little effect in the long run.

DIY Smartwatch: Other Components

With the main component of the watch being chosen, it's now time to choose everything else that will go into making this watch.  Since I chose a higher end screen, I'm going to shoot for other nicer components in order to get the most functionality out of it.

First off is the processor.  I chose an Atmega32u4 for several reasons.

• I'm very familiar with Arduino and AVR programming, plus the Arduino community has phenomenal support so I wanted a chip that was also on an Arduino board, namely the Atmega328p or Atmega32u4.
• I chose the Atmega32u4 because it has more pins, more memory, more Flash, and a built in USB core which would mean no extra chip required for USB programming.  The extra memory and Flash are also a plus since graphical programming result in a pretty large memory footprint.
• As an added plus, the Atmega32u4 has a way to internally change the processor speed so if it becomes an issue, I can speed up the chip when I need a speed boost.

For the Bluetooth 4.0 module I chose a module from FastTech mostly due to the fact that someone had already done all of the hard work, making an eagle component and breakout board.

I also decided to use this accelerometer from Sparkfun since it was the cheapest that they have and also has orientation and shake interrupts that I foresee using in the watch.

I decided to use this vibration motor from Sparkfun since it was already in their eagle library and I was making a purchase from them already.

I added the LiPo charging IC found on this board for to charge my battery directly from USB power.

And for the last of the major components I'm using a generic photocell to detect brightness

Aside from that I have a few other minor components such as regulators, headers, transistors, and passive components with a full BOM to be posted later.

DIY Smartwatch: Silent but not Idle

It may have been over a month since I've posted anything, but I've certainly been productive in that time!  I've gotten quite a few things done including making the bill of materials, circuit design, and board design as well as ordering everything I should need for the finished product.  Now that I'm waiting for everything to arrive, it's time to catch up on the documentation.

Over the next few days I'm going to try and write posts for how I established all of the other components to include in the circuit, how I designed the circuit itself, and how I designed the board.  The lines between these topics also became quite blurred as I went on so I'm only going to cover the finished product and briefly discuss how I arrived there.

In the past month another DIY watch similar to what I plan also popped up over at Hackaday so I may also take a post to comment on what I liked from that design, what I didn't, and overall what I thought of it.

Lastly, I noticed a pretty neat competition over at Instructables that I may try and enter, assuming I finish by the Nov 11th deadline.  Grand prize is a new laptop, 2nd gen Nexus 7, and quadcopter.  It looks like the requirements are very broad, it has to be designed with a microcontroller, so hopefully I'll be entering this watch as well as my Pi on the Face project.