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A project log for Conductor's Pocketwatch

A phone app and physical pocketwatch that tell you how late or early you are to your next event, based on the time and your current location

pointyointmentPointyOintment 08/19/2014 at 01:000 Comments

Over Christmas break 2012 (I think), my family and I watched The Polar Express (adapted from the children's book of the same title). The most interesting part of the movie for me was the Conductor's watch. It looked like this:

source: http://outnow.ch/Movies/2004/PolarExpress/Bilder/dvd-film.ws/17

While watching, I started to think about how such a device could be made. What I came up with was that it would need GPS, the user's schedule, and knowledge of how quickly the user can traverse the segments of the journey to the location of the next event on the schedule, as well as a processor and a user interface. Much later, I realized that it would be far easier to start with a smartphone app, because smartphones commonly already have all of those things. Then, with the phone app in place, it would be possible to simply connect the physical watch to the app using a wireless connection, so it wouldn't have to have those things too.

There is an official pocketwatch you can buy, with the Late/On Time/Early face, but it's just a regular pocketwatch that only tells you the current time of day. It looks like this:

(The site I got the image from is no longer available.) Anyway, it looks quite similar to the one in the movie, though not completely identical. I don't intend to make mine look that similar, but it will be trivial to swap out the image to get the appearance you want.

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