MSP430 Watch
I don’t know what is it about watches, but I find them very cool. But I’ve never seen a watch with the exact feature set I want. Obviously it should display the time in binary, it should allow me to do arbitrary computation on by wrist, display important prescient information about my life, and… I don’t know… allow me to communcate with aliens or something.
Anyway I was inspired by the msp430 LCD interfacing code posted on hackaday ( here ). And decided to try and put together a watch. It’s based aroudn the eZ430 development board, uses a CR2032 as it’s power source and has a couple of button switches and a 32.768kHz to allow it to keep accurate time. The display is from a Nokia phone. It’s used in the “6010 3595 3560 3510i 3530” at least that’s what ebay seller told me.
The code is written in C, and is included in a tarball at the end of the post. The completed unit fits inside a iPod Nano watch case:
This is what it looks like running:
Out of the case:
PCB (absolute mess):
A different PCB (slightly less messy):
It’s pretty big, but here’s how it compares to the Suunto core. It’s actually a little thinner (but a lot more delicate, and a litte… squarer).
Eventually it would be nice to get it to display alphanumeric data, text messages, alien transmissions etc. Unfortunately it’s a pretty tight squeeze on the msp430-2013. I can just about get a character set to fit, but have to miss out various other bits of code… like the code that clears the screen. I wonder if I can move the code to a larger 430… Currently the msp430 runs for a few days on a CR2032 using this LCD, not bad, but it would be nice to get it to run longer. I guess I should be able to put the msp430 to sleep, or clock it down, but I wonder if it isn’t the LCD that’s using most of the power.
Alphanumeric test:
Scrolling “Hello world” text, I’d like it to display something like this eventually:
And a fun numbers test:
The code is here:
msp430_watch.tar
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