Electrical engineer and product designer Samson March decided to build his own smartwatch. The result is stylish wrist candy with a 3D-printed wood-like outer case, color LCD display, Bluetooth connectivity and its own matching charging cradle. And he’s made all of the plans freely available so you could make one too.
Not being particularly fond of square smartwatches, March opted for a technically-more-complicated round design. He 3D-printed the upper and lower housing parts in woodfill PLA – which is about 70 percent plastic and 30 percent saw dust – and then sanded and stained them dark walnut.
The device’s custom circuit board fits into the lower housing and includes some storage for images of contacts and watch face backgrounds, Bluetooth LE, and so on. There’s an accelerometer that allows for the time to be shown when the system detects that the user’s wrist has been raised and a vibration motor so that March can feel when notifications are received. The upper housing is home to a 240 x 240 pixel LCD display.
The Smart Watch is powered by Li-ion batteries, which are charged on a custom charging cradle, 3D-printed to match the look of the smartwatch. Bringing it all together is a bunch of custom code to get everything talking to each other, and March’s smartphone communicating with his Smart Watch.
March has posted open source build plans, schematics, code, 3D printing files and so on to GitHub, allowing makers to create their own version of his Smart Watch.
DIY smartwatch has 3D-printed case, color display and custom charging cradle [New Atlas]