What do you do when you have a small spare organic LED display? If you’re computer engineering student Jared Sanson, you make a watch out of it, designing nearly every aspect of it from scratch.
This design was started at the circuit level, and after that, a PCB was laid out in Altium, which Jared only had limited experience using. Once the PCB and components arrived there were a few initial issues, but correcting your mistakes is always part of engineering a new item.
Once the hardware was functional, quite a bit of software work had to be done. In order to get everything running, including the firmware, graphics engine, and several other “details,” Jared used the C, C#, and Python languages. He humbly remarks on his blog that “it’s taken me a lot of work to get this far,” and I can only imagine how many hours were put into this project.
To finish things off, he considered using a 3D printed case, but decided to go with an aluminum case designed for the iPod Nano. After a little modification, it looks fantastic, but given the amount of detail put into the electronics and programming, I’m almost surprised that he didn’t make a mould and cast his own!
Slideshow pictures from above linked page, and OLED watch (1), OLED watch (2)
This week, July 14-19 2014, we’re exploring wearable electronics of all kinds on Make! If it is electronic and belongs on your body, we’d love to hear about it! You can find all of our wearable articles by going here.
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