Dev Board Watch Takes Path Of Least Resistance

Building your own watch is something of a maker’s rite of passage. Once upon a time, if you wore a wristwatch, you typically worked on producing your own compact PCB with everything packaged into a typical watch form factor, perhaps relying on simple binary output for compactness and simplicity. Times have changed, however, and [Arnov]design It is completely different in its construction.

The construction is based on a XIAO ESP32-C3 microcontroller board as the brain of the operation. It is paired with XIAO expansion board. It is designed to support the ESP32-C3, giving you plenty of I/O that can be accessed via easy-access connectors. It also has a display, a real-time clock, and a battery, pretty much the three main things you’d need to add to an ESP32 to turn it into a clock.

Therefore, with the electronics practically finished, it was simply up to [Arnov] to turn the device into a watch. He achieved this by screwing the frame and strap of an old Casio watch to a 3D printed holder for the XIAO expansion board. Once this was done, it was simply a matter of writing the code to display the RTC time on the screen. There are no connectivity features or smart features – just the time and date to read.

Some might criticize the project for simply slapping a watch strap on a development board. Or, you could look at how this indicates how quick and easy development can be these days. Once upon a time, you could spend weeks trying to find a cheap display and then more weeks trying to get it to work with your microcontroller. Now you can spend $20, get the parts in a few days, and start your project minutes later.

If you’ve created your own much more ornate clock, we’d love to see it too. Show us on the tip line!