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Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

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Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#61

Post by harry8 »

vzaliva wrote: post #59

I love the idea of smartwatches and owned several ones starting wit Pebble. But since I need reading glasses to read small print I have to give up on them and go back to old-school watch with hands. It is just not practical to stop in the middle of the street and put on my spectacles to read a notification.

So you need a smart watch with a bigger screen and font that you can't get at present. Others are almost certainly in the same boat. People who like tech of this nature are a generation who are aging so the demographic is growing. Everyone needs reading glasses if they live long enough.

There's an opportunity there! I have no doubt it will happen. Who, how etc? We'll see.

Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#64

Post by abetusk »

Wow, this article doesn't do it justice.

Watchy is an open source hardware device that uses an e-ink display and has an ESP32 module builtin [0].

SQFMI, the creator of watchy, has a twitter account [1] which has some very nice screenshots [2] [3]. Even the CrowdSupply website has better pics of the device [4].

This is one of the few watches I've been sorely tempted to buy.

[0] https://github.com/sqfmi/Watchy

[1] https://twitter.com/sqfmi

[2] https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1351647180382228488

[3] https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1357177624523661315

[4] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy

Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#65

Post by vzaliva »

harry8 wrote: post #61
vzaliva wrote: post #59

I love the idea of smartwatches and owned several ones starting wit Pebble. But since I need reading glasses to read small print I have to give up on them and go back to old-school watch with hands. It is just not practical to stop in the middle of the street and put on my spectacles to read a notification.

So you need a smart watch with a bigger screen and font that you can't get at present. Others are almost certainly in the same boat. People who like tech of this nature are a generation who are aging so the demographic is growing. Everyone needs reading glasses if they live long enough. There's an opportunity there! I have no doubt it will happen. Who, how etc? We'll see.

"According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction. About 64% of them wear eyeglasses, and about 11% wear contact lenses, either exclusively, or with glasses. Over half of all women and about 42% of men wear glasses."

Apparently I am not alone and this statistics shows that smartwatches are not suitable for a significant part of population. In other words they will never be as poppular as smartphones.

As to bigger screen suggestion, depending on how bad your vision is, you man need such a huge screen to read without glasses it becomes impractical.

Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#66

Post by brundolf »

Sodman wrote: post #30

Very excited for something like this! I can think of a few fun projects to try that would be useful to me nearly everyday but are too trivial or niche for an Apple or a Samsung to ever spend time actually building. Some ideas off of the top of my head: - Vibrate a bunch and notify me on-screen if my usual commuter train is running late or cancelled (but only if I haven't left my house yet). Also the same, but in reve…

These are great ideas that might actually be in the realm of feasibility (assuming your IoT devices run on some open standard), but the shame with this kind of thing in 2021 is that most of my digital life does not run on open standards, and so a programmable device has limited usefulness. I probably couldn't use it to play or control my media, to control my other (non-custom) devices, to display information from social media or from my bank accounts or tap into my subscriptions or interface with my personal cloud data. There are some exceptions and workarounds - most of them based on the web and web scraping - but most of those give you the sense that they only still exist because the company forgot about them, or doesn't care enough to retire them

Walled-gardens have made it really hard to do novel things in your personal digital life

Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#67

Post by newsbinator »

Sodman wrote: post #30

Very excited for something like this! I can think of a few fun projects to try that would be useful to me nearly everyday but are too trivial or niche for an Apple or a Samsung to ever spend time actually building. Some ideas off of the top of my head: - Vibrate a bunch and notify me on-screen if my usual commuter train is running late or cancelled (but only if I haven't left my house yet). Also the same, but in reve…

For the one-button touch to fake a phone call, add a 60-second delay before call happens and don’t touch your watch during that time, for maximum deniability.

Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#68

Post by justatdotin »

hluska wrote: post #57
sfRattan wrote: post #17

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I have subzero interest in smartwatches, even hackable or open source models. I want my watch to tell me the time, and I want it to do so 10, 20, and 30 years from now without having to fiddle with software. I love Linux. I cut my teeth on it in high school after one too many viruses on Windows XP made me bite the bullet and try debian. I love my Raspberry Pi. It went from retro-gaming con…

I used to be in your camp but then I got really fit and got into masochism through endurance sports. Now, I see a massive utility to smartwatches but my damned wrists are too small to wear any watch.

#humblebrag

Re: Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

#70

Post by tinus_hn »

Alupis wrote: post #44
sfRattan wrote: post #17

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I have subzero interest in smartwatches, even hackable or open source models. I want my watch to tell me the time, and I want it to do so 10, 20, and 30 years from now without having to fiddle with software. I love Linux. I cut my teeth on it in high school after one too many viruses on Windows XP made me bite the bullet and try debian. I love my Raspberry Pi. It went from retro-gaming con…

> Apple Watch, Android Wear, Pebble, and now Watchy... All these devices will be e-waste in 30 years (most in less than 10). It is interesting, given the amount of environmental concerns people have over cow flatulates, plastic bags, straws, etc... that nobody seems concerned about these obviously short-lifetime hunks of non-biodegradable/non-recyclable plastics, rubber, silicone, rare earth metals, and worse. All th…

You can give your Apple Watch to Apple and they’ll recycle the parts for you.

Besides, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to compare the lifetime of an Apple Watch to that of a plastic straw.

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