The most important feature I care about in a smartwatch? Synchronizing timezones.
The goal of this project is to build a smartwatch that looks and feels like the watch I wear everyday, just a little better. That means analogue hands, thin profile, and long battery life. On top of that, synching time with travel/daylight savings, and just a small OLED for basic notifications. I'll pass on the camera and secret agent phone calls.
Major ICs are listed in the components section, and a complete BOM is in the files. Briefly, I'm desiging for: Atmega328p MCU, Nordic nRF8001 BLE, 32x128 monochrome OLED, 9DoF IMU, and a quartz movement.
I managed to get a breadboard prototype of the major components (battery, MCU, BLE, watch, OLED) to a stable working state. I haven't bothered to hook up the accelerometer at this point, as that's somewhat of a bonus feature to me. The code is functional, but not great. I'll upload it once it's cleaned up a bit. But, I'm able to display text and symbols on the OLED which I send from my phone!
The OLED and BLE are situated in modules right now, but will be broken out into the components in the layout (in progress). The Arduino board is just there for the FTDI chip, and the whole system can run off the LiPol after programming. I'd like to start running some power consumption tests, but haven't figured out a good technique yet.
Image of the breadboard setup, with major sections highlighted:
Uploaded the first complete draft of the schematic!
It draws primarily from the SparkFun and Adafruit Eagle libraries (so convenient!). Will be working through a layout draft in the coming days. I might have to build some work-arounds for the Eagle student edition limitations.