Who makes an anachronistic-but-who-cares steampunk LED wristwatch from scratch? Eric Schleapfer does. Nice work!
Yes, it’s an LED steampunk wristwatch! It uses the LED wristwatch board… The watch is constructed from a small piece of oak and pieces of brass sheet and tubing. I used hand tools, a Dremel tool and a cordless drill to shape and form each of the pieces.
Back to the watch. Sure, this doesn’t use a vacuum tube, but it’s still a neat way to reuse some old-fashioned 7-segment LED displays. It keeps the time with a fairly pedestrian PIC16F628A. It has an internal timer that operates with a separate oscillator (which is the watch crystal in the lower right corner) which can run even during sleep mode. This is critical to keeping the power consumption low. When a timer tick occurs, it generates a wakeup event, and the processor can increment the internal timekeeping registers. The processor can also wake up when one of the buttons is pressed. When that happens, it turns on and starts multiplexing the LEDs so that it can display the time. After a short delay it goes back into sleep mode. I haven’t yet calculated or tested the battery life.
There are four more LED wristwatch boards left. I wonder what style of watch I should make next…
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