Hello Hackaday people, the post you are looking for is here
I found this watch at a market in Somerset. I find it utterly fascinating in that it’s a rather advanced piece of kit, certainly compared to what you could buy 10 years ago, while also being completely ridiculous.
It’s called a Montres Carlo 30420.
The scrolling text is quite impressive, and indicates to me a rather complex ASIC, or possibly even a small microcontroller. The battery life is also pretty good, it’s been running for months now using a CR2025.
You can see that they’ve decided to mount the LED backlight directly behind the screen, so it lights up a single spot. It’s also a multi colour LED, which flashes in various colours, because that’s cool.
Here are some internal pictures:
You can see that the Solar cell only has one terminal connected… I wonder if that can possibly work….
I always find it a shame that the ICs are buried in epoxy, I always have the urge to find out what’s under there. Perhaps I need an acid bath and a microscope…
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:
I wanted to post some pictures of the paper my girlfriend bought me in Kyoto at a very cool little stationary shop. It’s laid out in a beautifully watermarked grid. It’s the kind of paper that makes me want to learn more Kanji, just so I can write beautiful letters.
I also found it ironic that I went to every stationer I could find in Oxford and couldn’t find paper anywhere nearly as well designed. Oxford, which is supposedly one of the literary capitals of the western world… Ho hum.
I wanted to know how many “citation needed” tags there were in the English language wikipedia. So I downloaded the english language dump and did a quick grep:
My name is Nava Whiteford. I’ve worked for a few sequencing companies. I have equity in a few sequencing companies based on my previous employment (I try to be unbiased in my posts). You can contact me at: [email protected]
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