ESP32 GPS Watch

Description

WOW! What a great project. This journey took about a year of on/off tinkering and a multitude of iterations. It wasn’t a linear process, and I learned so much. It is, software wise, unfinished.

Objective: The general idea was to design, 3D print, and program a watch with all the capabilities of the average smart watch found at a store. In this end, it was successful; it has the following abilities: Time, Date, Heart Rate, Blood Oxygen, GPS, Bluetooth, data Storage, and WiFi. It uses a joystick for navigation. It is an “open design”, where the components such as the battery, circuit board, and heart rate monitor are not hidden, saving quite a bit of space. Also, the OLED (one color) isn’t too too difficult to see outside (although bright days make it pretty difficult). At this moment, the project is not fully completed… it’s an ongoing process.

Use my design for inspiration. Some changes are needed for full functionality.

Details

1st Thing: I want to emphasize how much my understanding of electronics changed throughout the course of this project. Even so, there are still many design flaws that have not been addressed. Keep this is mind

Basic Outline: The watch is a base plate with a circuit board glued on top and a screen soldered above the circuit. An antennae as well as a heart rate sensor is glued on the bottom of this base. The wrist band is sewn onto the base. For the GPS module and the battery, an extra piece of fabric was used to make a sleeve for them on the bottom of a portion of the watch band near the circuit board. Not perfect, but, given the space and price restraints, it is functional and the flaws are almost unnoticeable when worn. Surprisingly, it is pretty comfortable, given that everything is mounted in the right positions. It can be programmed from the pins that protrude from the top of the watch. Idle (with little/no software efficiency code) the watch battery can last most of a day.

Design Flaws:

-Software is not completed: both bluetooth and WiFi have not been tested or confirmed fully functional

-Pretty difficult to solder and wire up

-BATTERY REGULATION DOES NOT FULLY FUNCTION: This is the deal breaker. Other than the lipo protection circuit within the battery, low voltage protection worked poorly on the watch. Supposably, the voltage divider present in the design was supposed to trigger the ESP to go into a deep sleep state, drawing almost no battery, when it detected a low enough voltage; however, the AMS1117 I used in the circuit would stop functioning and bring the ESP into a reboot cycle before it was able to turn it self off. This must be addressed before this watch can be used past prototyping.

Files

WatchHolder.f3d

Watch Holder

f3d - 78.65 kB - 10/06/2024 at 20:10

Download

SmartWatch.brd

Watch Circuit Board

brd - 166.82 kB - 10/06/2024 at 20:02

Download

SmartWatch.sch

Watch Schematic

sch - 513.26 kB - 10/06/2024 at 20:02

Download

Project Logs

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Version 4

Ethan • 10/06/2024 at 20:20 • 0 comments

Finished Product! Definitely look clean. It’s thinner than many smart watches.

Version 3

Ethan • 10/06/2024 at 20:19 • 0 comments

Version 3: My first shot at designing a circuit board. Initial Idea was two circuit boards with a battery in between, but this design was extremely bulky and quite unreliable.

Version 2

Ethan • 10/06/2024 at 20:18 • 0 comments

This was more of a prototype board than a version of the watch. This is where I learned the basics of compound circuits and tried various components. (Note: pictured components are from an earlier version and are not used in the finished product)

Version 1

Ethan • 10/06/2024 at 20:15 • 0 comments

Initially just a proof of concept… not really something you would want to wear on your wrist. It used an ATMega processor and didn’t do much other than keep track of time and act as a stopwatch. Definitely learned that I would need to learn custom circuit design as well as use a lipo battery pack.

Discussions

ESP32 GPS Watch

Description

Details