Hi guys, how are you?
I made a smart watch from scratch
151–160 of 228 posts
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Just put wheels on a helicopter and now you have a flying car.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#153I 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
Or like $6800 depending on how you value your time.
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.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#154Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#155We 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.
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 majorit…
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Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#156Very 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…
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
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
And assuming they didn't merge their fork back in, the original FreeRTOS codebase doesn't get any of their fixes/improvements either.
And there is nothing stopping you from taking the original GPL'd FreeRTOS codebase and merging in all of the MIT licensed improvements. If you make a better FreeRTOS, that's what people will use. I've seen this happen many times in open source. For example, to this day LGPL's LibreOffice, which started as a fork of OpenOffice, reviews all OpenOffice patches and cherry picks the good ones.[1] On the other hand, Apache…
GPL licenses tend to discourage adoption due to their onerous restrictions, which is why most projects today choose anything other than the GPL family of licenses.
The virality of GPL actually results in most companies explicitly banning the use of GPL tools and code to prevent the GPL from "infecting" their own code.
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
if there was literally one reason to have a flying car
I'll give two: reduce traffic jams, and less need to build/maintain roads. The average commute time* is about an hour a day. Giving people back that time to spend with their family, to work, to play would be an amazing boon to society. The real issue is that the technology to make practical (cheap, fast, quiet, safe) flying cars doesn't exist. A practical flying car would also solve the housing price crisis in cities as people could fly in from the exurbs.
* https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/650061560/stuck-in-traffic-yo...
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
I believe withings is no longer part of Nokia
Re: I made a smart watch from scratch
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
if there was literally one reason to have a flying car I'll give two: reduce traffic jams, and less need to build/maintain roads. The average commute time* is about an hour a day. Giving people back that time to spend with their family, to work, to play would be an amazing boon to society. The real issue is that the technology to make practical (cheap, fast, quiet, safe) flying cars doesn't exist. A practical flying…
> A practical flying car would also solve the housing price crisis in cities as people could fly in from the exurbs.
Doesn't this just reinvent the problem? You're currently spending a long time commuting due to congestion; you'll now spend a long time commuting due to sheer distance.