Project Cerberus: Dead Man's Smartwatch

Welp, no challenge round funding (and the other challenge rounds aren't relevant) no way for a broke student to finish this project. That really puts a damper on enthusiasm when I know I can't implement key features to the design, given prototyping requirements.

Guess I'll pivot to some sort of active authentication dongle with similar technologies. Only way to really salvage the project now.

It's been a busy, busy month. Turns out full-time post-secondary schooling, as well as 15 to 20 hours a week of paid work (to pay for school, and projects) doesn't leave all that much time and energy for projects and other productive tasks. That being said, I've managed to poke at my project somewhat, as I do have a couple modules (close enough in function to what I'd want to use) to get started at getting some base functionality in.

This project does need a lot more development, but it's a little difficult to fit all in since the start of the competition. This project was an idea I had had late last year, but didn't have time to get started on until the competition had started. It can be hard to compete against other projects that already have a year or more of time put into them...

Unfortunately, as far as challenge rounds go, only the first two are relevant to this project, so it'd be very hard to compete in any of the later challenge rounds without massive rework of the concept.

This project started out as a concept: "Deadman's Smartwatch". This is actually a decent project tagline, but not a very good project name, and as such, may I now announce...

--- Project Cerberus ---

Taken from Greek mythology, I chose "Cerberus" as a name because this device acts as a biometric watchdog. Not like the name hasn't been used for security, surveillance, and monitoring devices before!

Thanks to Nordic and their social media outreach programs, I won one of the official dev boards (for the nRF52, my target platform). They even bundled a few sample chips. This will make my project much easier (and something to test on while waiting on PCBs and the like).

In the first iteration, I'm still planning on including the mbed HDK which includes the CMSIS-DAP debugger (including drag and drop programming), as well as making a small board to do that during the second iteration (when it's actually a watch form factor device). After all, I'm planning a small beta test, and the testers will need to be able to update the devices in case of bricking, or firmware fixes.

As a tangent to the current project, it was suggested I could drop the biometric sensors (perhaps integrate a fingerprint reader somehow), and making a 2 factor authentication fob/dongle device. It'd be a fairly straight forwards fork, so perhaps in between iterations 2 and 3, if funding prevents me from proceeding on the full 3rd iteration of the watch.

Of course, if having the watch come off invalidate your keys seems like a frightening concept, it's just a matter of software that would make this project a more generic smart watch as well. But hey, that's less fun (but it's not a huge step).

Right, since I ran out of room in the description, here's the plan. It consists of three stages.

1) Spread out development board with integrated debugger and power measurement. This is already underway in the design stage.

2) Smart watch sized unit, likely a 4 layer PCB, using the QFN package. Custom printed case, not going to be super polished or water proof.

3) Funds permitting, custom milled/SLS printed case and inserts, high layer count PCB (6 most likely) to minimize size, usage of lots of chip-scale packages (the MCU is QFN only for now, but Nordic is planning on releasing the CSP variant later in the year). If the project goes well, I'll request engineering samples for the MCU in order to be done in time for the contest closing in October.