It used to be that building your own watch was either a big project or it meant that you didn’t really care about how something looked on your wrist. But now with modern parts and construction techniques, a good-looking smart watch isn’t out of reach of the home shop. But if you don’t want to totally do it yourself, you can turn to a kit and that’s what Stephen Cass did. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, he took a kit called a Watchy and put it through its paces for you.
With its gray-tinted screen, Squarofumi’s Watchy inevitably conjures echoes of the Pebble smartwatch, which made a huge splash in 2012 when it raised over US $10 million on Kickstarter. Pebble ultimately had its lunch eaten by Apple and others, but Watchy is different in a few key respects: It is not trying to be a mass-market device. It is unashamedly for those willing to tangle with code. It’s also inexpensive — just $50 versus the Pebble’s $150, let alone the Apple Watch’s $400 price tag.
See https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/the-ieee-builds-a-smart-watch/
#technology #hardware #watchy #opensource #smartwatch
Is that what happened with the components for Watchy? Can you provide any specific details so we are all aware then? Well then they certainly don’t deserve to be promoted at all - I thought it was quite a noble idea actually. Now I’m concerned about them as there was no mention about it in any articles I saw.
No, it’s not about Watchy specifically, but electronics as a whole. Nearly nobody in this industry cares about mineral mining conditions. For this reason I only buy used electronic devices, but if you build something on your own you cannot buy everything used and for many components it is close to impossible to find a manufacturer that uses materials that were mined under at least somewhat fair conditions. Apart from these general social problems what I like about projects like Watchy is that they increase repairability which is a huge ecological problem especially for wearables.
Ah OK I was worried and do not want to give the wrong impression about Watchy if they have no guilt. Really should start a different topic for that then to focus specifically on that issue and maybe list the guilty parties.