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A project log for Custom Smartwatch

An ESP32 Based Open-Source Smartwatch

matthew-james-bellafaireMatthew James Bellafaire 11/18/2019 at 18:000 Comments

Well, everything's here, time to check fitting. Thanks to the KiCAD Stepz export plugin this hasn't been too much of a worry. The basic idea for the design here is just to get everything together into one case, here's what I came up with: 

The top of the shell is held together with 4 #6 screws and the strap wraps through the slot on the left. Overall this design is slightly larger than expected but there's a lot that I can (and will) cut out of it to reduce the size. For now it works. 

With all that said the boards and stencil have finally arrived, they're looking alright

It's not exactly visible here but the soldermask pullback on the QFN packages is less than ideal, I'm worried about the overall difficulty I may encounter attempting to reflow these boards. However, every other visual inspection of these boards is positive. the overall fit is perfect in the case along with the battery: 

And finally with the top part and screen: 

I still need to determine where to add the holes for the buttons, but overall this gets the job done for what I needed. At the moment my only complaint is that the watch is taller than it should be but I guess there's just some work that needs to be done there. 

So far I'm very happy with how this project has been progressing. I plan to use this version of the watch for a decent amount of time to determine what improvements need to be made to the hardware. The final version will be more-or-less the same form factor shown here. Ideally the final version does away with the buttons and opts for a 2.2" touch screen panel, but I'll talk more about future plans for this project as soon as this phase is complete. 


next up is assembly. 

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