There are plenty of rumours about Apple’s iWatch. For instance, that it will feature a bunch of biosensing technology to monitor a wearer’s blood sugar, heart rate and physical activity. Or that it will use a slap-bracelet style wristband to evoke 90s nostalgia. Or that it will control your brain waves so that the CIA can reprogram you to buy more dairy products. Why wait for all of those fabulous features when you can build your own smart watch?
This year, the winner of Make Magazine’s Arduino Challenge, Jonathan Cook, did just that, creating a smart watch made from a microduino, a 3D-printed case, and a bunch of hardware, transistors, buttons and wires.
The watch is the product of nine months of testing and research. At the moment, it has Bluetooth LE connectivity and can tell the date and time, but Cook is in the process of adding even more functionality. Saying, “I see this first as an open source ‘pebble’ type project,” Cook is working on email, Facebook notification, twitter updates, and other connected pieces of software to make his BLE smartwatch much smarter.
The project is not for the faint of heart, but you can build your own version from instructions published at Cook’s Open Source Watch site. As you can see, there’s a good deal of soldering and the wiring is a bit of a mess in the watch’s compact 3D-printed case (.stl files for which are located here). The BLE smartwatch, however, is such a brilliant concept that Make is rewarding Cook with a trip to Maker Faire Rome this year.
The watch may not be all that smart right now, but, as Cook works on it and other ambitious Makers start building their own, I bet we’ll have something that rivals the most intelligent of watches developed by the richest of corporations in no time. Then, we can all sell out and move to the Bahamas.
Source: Make
