oh god this is it a smart watch but it just ah
oh yeah look there it is it's still keeping time wearables some of them are okay but a
lot of them are less okay between their unintuitive interfaces patchy app
compatibility subpar battery life and nasty habit of phoning home with all of
your most intimate details it is no wonder that someone finally said it
forget this i'm gonna build my own smart watch
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Linus
i'm gonna be up front we didn't do this whole thing on our own in fact all we
really did was print ourselves a neat watch case and wrist strap
but what's cool about this project is that we could make this watch if we
wanted to both the hardware and the software are completely open source and
the name of the project you ask i'm glad you did it's open source smartwatch
it's a good name paul smith the lead is a full stack
cloud developer by day maker by night and you might think that someone who
works in cloud computing would have wanted every aspect of their project to
synchronize with cloud servers but it's
actually quite the opposite while wearables might not be on your radar the
biggest tech giants in the world have latched onto them and for good reason
besides being an ever-present link to your smartphone they are the perfect
opportunity to load somebody up with sensors and while those sensors can do
extremely valuable things like measure your heart rate or your movement
the unseen bonus for these tech companies is the absolute treasure trove
of data that can be harvested from them that is what made paul so uncomfortable
starting back in 2018 then he began with an e-ink display an older esp module and
a handful of surface mount components the first test mule might not have been
the prettiest thing in the world but it was clearly a strong start because look
where we are just a few short years
later like look at this thing it's a little on the
bulky side but damn it's wearable you know
like because it's a wearable get it but i just mean it's not luggable like
it's it's wearable it's a little rough around the edges
literally like ow but there it is
the goal was to make a watch that supported modern conveniences gps maps
and tracking but stored the data locally on a micro sd card and paul has actually
got all of that going but the version that i'm wearing is the light edition
that means no gps or sd expansion but it
also means a smaller pcb and therefore body size
as far as the software goes there are a few watch faces and some hardware demos
but that's about it now the light edition here started out
as a side quest but has become a pretty popular one just a few days ago pcb
manufacturer lilligo made a trial run of these watch assemblies that sold out
within minutes and that bodes really well for getting this hardware into the
hands of a community of people that will build upon paul's work and develop new
software for it but then let's say they do that what would you
get every part of our watch is 3d printed even the flexible strap which
before we did this video i didn't even know that you could print such like
rugged flexible things that's super neat at first glance here we've got a 200 by
200 pixel round ips display of course
it's not quite 4000 pixels because it's round but it looks pretty good from all
angles and has more than ample brightness below that we've got four
buttons and a micro usb port for data transfer and charging
the top left button is reset then the other three are utility buttons that
vary depending on what app you're using and i gotta say
i am so glad to see hardware buttons like i use my pebble time for music
control when i'm on my motorcycle and it's like tactile buttons hello
sometimes i wear gloves on this one then if we long press the
lower left button like so we get a little white square that pops up and
then on release we change pages so far there are only six pages the watch face
a stop watch a connection test to link to the wi-fi you configured a ball and
cross-hair test for the accelerometer this could kind of pass for a game right
how long can you hold your ARM level
and finally some system info paul was
also nice enough to do a custom page for us that actually plays our intro which
is super neat it has some issues you can actually see
there's a bit of artifacting in the beginning of the animation but
considering he slapped this together in 20 minutes i think i'll give him a pass
now because it's not all sealed up with an insane amount of adhesive all we have
to do to take it apart is remove i mean we gotta get the strap working
and then all we have to do is take off these four screws to show you what's
inside ifixit score 10 out of 10.
just like the shirts at lttstore.com will make you a 10 out of 10. if you
know what i mean
okay so we just gotta give it a little pop
there's the screen gotta be careful all right there we go so under the
screen you find the brains of the operation or well okay actually it's on
the underside of this oh good lord
okay i've completely broomed it colin all the buttons fell out there it is
that right there is the open smartwatch pcb in all of its glory it's just 36
millimeters in diameter so that's 1.4 inches for you liberians and its heart
is this tiny little chip right here the ttgo32 micro it's a system and package
module based on the esp32 made by expressif the esp line of chips has
absolutely surged in popularity lately due to their low cost large feature set
and diminutive size this one in particular is actually even smaller than
most of them about half the area of a normal esp32 measuring at just 13.3 by
19.2 millimeters and this tiny powerhouse is an absolute bargain at
around seven dollars not only is it a very capable processor
you can even run python on it it has built-in wi-fi and bluetooth and a huge
variety of open source tools and libraries to build upon so it's a
logical choice for someone who's bootstrapping a small device like this
one we've actually been using a relative of this guy in some of our own projects
here at LMG now we're not going to go too deep into the pcb design here
because frankly we're not qualified however the
fine folks over at hackster.io have written an excellent breakdown of this
entire board so if you want to dive into the components we're going to have that
linked in the comments for you to keep it simple though this light version of
the open smartwatch packs a barometer tri-axial accelerometer a real-time
clock and all of the power conversion and charging ics that are needed to keep
this thing running and run it will in fact by pulse calculations the 450
milliamp hour single cell lipo down here should give you up to 50 days of sleep
time due to all the power conserving features that are built into the board
and the software although of course feature creep like you know say for
example watch faces that are more than just a thing moving like this are
probably going to reduce that and guys
that's it that's the whole thing
at least for the electronic side of it for proof of concept we pulled down some
of the cad files for the project and gave them a go ourselves in our prusa
sl1 resin printer and made this case which is a variant that supports 20
millimeter spring pin watch bands and oop well okay we got the tolerances
off just a little bit on that one but hey generally speaking it feels a lot more
finished because like men those resin printers
like basically feels so good by the way if you guys are
into 3d printing get subscribed because we have some really cool stuff in the
works we are making a case and we're actually checking out a chocolate
printer now of course
for the average consumer today the open smartwatch isn't very
smart really at all it doesn't even have on-risk
notifications so um
pretty much all it does is tell the time which means you might be wondering why
we bothered to feature it on Linus tech tips
the reason is that we really like paul's moxie
paul thinks that you should at least have the choice to keep your data to
yourself and we want to see this project become a success
yeah there's no app store but there's also no micro transactions no monthly
access plans and no cloud phoning home
just a cool tech project that we are rooting for along with other similar
ones like the pine time which is made by the same folks that brought us the pine
phone that you saw in ShortCircuit and the watchi both of those are also open
source these sorts of projects hardly ever get
the same sort of traction that big consumer bucks can bring to a device but
it's really important to us that they continue to exist so guys if you've got
the time and you've got the skills reach out to the developers in the link below
if you want to help them move forward and while you're down looking at the
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squarespace both linusmediagroup.com and ltxexpo.com were built quickly using
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we hope you guys enjoyed us taking a look at this neat little watch project
and if you like sort of out there wearables why not take a look at our
video covering the nubia alpha a device that i absolutely loved even though
objectively speaking it was just atrocious
it's really bad