Description of the product

The 603-200 is the first watch of a planed line of watches based on the same concept which is inspired by the Japanese TokyoFlash® brand (www.tokyoflash.com). We want to push the concept to a fully modern connected watch capable of establishing communication with your SmartPhone or any other IoT.

This watch is an open source device. The customers and makers have access to all the documentation

What the watch can do :

The 603-200 Morphwatch® has been mainly design to produce exciting visual effects with its collertion of  192 leds. There are 4 circles of 603 size format SMD color leds.

Each LED can be programmed independently with I2C libraries or through PYTHON Script. The user can be very creative with visual effects. 

Now the visual effects put aside, the watch has much more to offer because it has a powerfull Espressif® ESP32 PICO D4 chip. Therefore, it is a complete connected modern watch which is capable of interaction with your smartphone through Bluetooth. Using your phone you can use the watch to communicate into a private MESH wireless digital network. You can ask your watch to vibrate when your phone if away (with Bluetooth) or very far away (with WIFI).  

With 4 buttons, you can design your watch to trigger a relay, send an emergency email, send a vibration information to another watch  and more….

With MESH ESPNow protocol, each watch can talk to another, sometimes over hundreds of meters : you can build your private long range messenging system outside cellular networks...

You can switch your watch to be an access point, a web server so any one can connect to grab information (a watch business card concept…) And of course, you have guessed already, this watch can tell you the time !

The genesis of this project came from seeing all these millenials with the same i-clock around the wrist. It  was also the fear of loosing control on our wearables with top 3 companies forcing us to accept what they think good for us (for them to be more ironic). 

We are not re-inventing everything. This watch is inspired by another opensource project we found on CrowdSupply.com .  

Wa wanted to create an hybrid concept of vintage LED watch + connected watch.  We naturally came to an ESP32 PICO D4 chip  which is powerful and super classic 603 led. If the first prototype is ok, we will move the 603 led package to 402 and reduce the watch diameter.

With a set of 192 LED, driven by a classic IS31FL3733-TQ chip, we can have a bunch of cool visual effects we can design with no limitation but creativity.  Each single LED can be controlled independently via I2C.

The ESP32 PICO 4D opens the watch to connectivity with WIFI/BT and most of all ESPNOW which allow us to create a community MESH networks. If there are anough watch, we hope to build a world communication network beside the commercially locked communication network.

The first concept was created using solidworks. This is a cool software to evaluate the possibilities and test various graphic options.  

Once the design has been freezed (well nothing is really frozen with me), we used www.kicad-pcb.org pcb board creation software to make our first prototype.

ONE MOTHER PCBoard

We have build our strategy based on a limitation of the risk and possible personnalization . There is a basic first plate with all the watch components (mosly based on the schematic of another open source watch project called: watchy.  (Credits).  You have most of the classic modules

We are obviously going to check the battery status very often to handle energy in this project.. The ESP32 Pico D4 will read the battery level from (ADC).  

This first PCB sends the power and I2C signal to the sister board holding the LEDS and the led driver. Doing this way, we can easily design various different sister boards to follow the fashion ... 

The Mother board has the plug and buttons to select various fonctions.

The WIFI/BT antenna is a PCB antenna. We plan a RFM95 _868/915MHZ option in a further version. We will have to fight to handle 2 different antennas. We ll see when the issue occurs. 

The USB plug to charge and to upload Arduino IDE sketches  will be though an USB-C plug.


A LED SISTER PCBoard

The second part of the concept is to have a sister board which will hold the 192 LEDS.  A set of 3 connectors send the power and signals from main board to the sister board. We found interesting to use this contact so it will be easy for makers to redesign a sister board  with their own design and creativity (add a true color display, make different other LED drawings, add micromotors with complications etc ....).  Having a 2nd board is also a good way to take the battery in sandwich. 

The LED sister board is pluggable. The idea of the watch , using the inox screw, is to invite the use to open the watch and play with it. 

Beside the LEDS, only one IC is used, it is an IS31FL3733-TQ , accepting IC2 protocol to drive up to 192 LEDS. organized in matrix. You see nothing particularly clever. 

It gives a cool 56mm diameter PCB (more for men and RAP singers :) ) . Once the prototype will be tested functional, we will move the 603 package to 402 and reduce the diameter to probably 40mm , more suitable for womens and non warriors. 

The fought a few hours trying to design a 2 layers PCB with no success. This will consequently be a 4 layers PCB.  Pretty crowdy isn't it ?

We are now at this point.... Keep being tuned .. More information soon ....

CHECK OUR GITHUB

Licence is: APACHE2 https://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/