DingWatch 0.3

Hello all!

I've made some progress on this menu item. The timer can now count up, count down, pause, reset, and pop open after being closed when the countdown timer fires. I also included a menu option for including or excluding hours from either count, and have two different screens based on that decision to optimize screen real estate. I had no idea how involved such a simple looking set of features would end up being, but I'm really happy with how everything's looking.

Here's a little video of all the features I've built. Over the next few weekends I'll start getting to work on a timezone selector. I've got a little mockup with some rough ideas together, but I'm not certain how best to approach actually selecting between the locations and time zones. I know many watches with similar features have a bunch of logged city names and you just select whatever is closest to where you're traveling to, so I might try something similar.

As far as hardware goes, I've got some rough ideas together but I have very little experience with PCB design and layout. I'm looking forward to learning more and getting away from the breadboard!

I'm also on the hunt for just the right buttons and switches for this design. I'm currently using a rotary encoder to interact with the menu, but I'm not certain if I would prefer that or some other navigation method. There's some really cool hall effect thumbwheel switches that are spring loaded to return to their center position, but I think they're likely a little too big for this design. As well, I'm fairly certain they don't have a pushbutton like my encoder currently has. I'm open to suggestions!

Last week I had some more time to work on the DingWatch. The Pebble had an app I was quite fond of called Timer+, which in a rather beautiful way combined a stopwatch with a countdown timer. I aim to achieve something similar with my StopWTimer screen, but for now I have a working countdown timer! There's still some things to iron out, but it works! It even kicks you back onto the StopWTimer screen when the timer ends if you left it mid-countdown.

Next up will be a counting-up timer with lap functions. From there a on-the-fly time zone selector will likely be my next feature to add.

Exciting times ahead!

Here's a demo video of my recent progress:

Well, to be fair I modified a library.

Micro Crystal has a new chip out, the RV-3032-C7 that beats the Maxim DS3231 in basically every way. It's more accurate, lower power, takes a wider voltage range, is smaller, the list goes on. I got my demo board from them a couple days ago and have been very impressed.

I have been tooling around with Sparkfun's RV-8803 library and have managed to get nearly everything working on this new RTC. Check out the Github repo!

https://github.com/KineticLabs25/RV-3032-C7

Hello everyone!

I'm fairly early into my development plan for this project, but I'm feeling pretty excited. This is also my first Hackaday-published project, so I'm excited to hear input and advice from you all on how best to see this through.

I'm not too sure how to start this off, so how about some backstory?

I graduated with a BS in mechanical engineering nearly a year ago, and during that time I gained a little bit of arduino knowledge. Just enough to know there's some really cool potential projects in this field. Not enough knowledge to realize when I'm biting off a little more than I can chew. 

I used to own a Pebble and I adored it. Long battery life, great simple apps, and great watch faces. I stopped wearing mine at some point because while I enjoyed what it could do, I found that a smartwatch doesn't really improve my life in any significant way. I got a Citizen analog watch on the cheap and it's been on my wrist ever since.

I realized at some point a few months back that I missed having a digital display. The casio-lookalike watchfaces on the Pebble were always my go-to's. I started looking at all sorts of digital watches, and there were a lot out there, but none were quite what I was looking for. That familiar little itch started in the back of my brain, and before long I had convinced myself that I could totally make one exactly to my specification. I started ordering parts and set off on this project about two months ago.

So, this project is pretty much just that. I want to make a simple watch with some very basic functions, long battery life (like really, as long as physically possible), and wrap it up in a neat package that I can put on my wrist and not give much of a second thought to.

Allow me to re-emphasize that I'm a mechanical engineer by trade, and my skills in coding are pretty limited. I've been learning as I go, so there's certainly optimizations I haven't discovered or implemented. I've toyed around with the samd21 low power libraries, but haven't included it in this design yet. I intend to!

Thanks for looking! I'll be sure to throw an update over at any major milestones.