I ‘ve decided to work every year between Dec 25 and the new year day on a fun project that I might feel… tol “embarrassed” to work on on any other occasion. Last year it was an arduino-based game console with a 4×20 LCD screen and 4 buttons (about which I should write sometime). This year it was SparkFun’s BigTime Watch, which is an Atmel-baed flavor of the Solder watch. I was already thinking about throwing together something that I could use as a watch, so this was love at first sight.
The little red box arrived today and I started putting it together right away. Overall, I was very impressed by how well the pieces fitted together, with only minimum effort. This goes especially for the lasercut acrylic plates. The final piece is quite bulky, but there is a lot of space for improvement. I plan to wear it on a daily basis but let’s be honest, this is a fun, geeky project and I’ve set a very low bar on how well it might fare on my wrist. Here are a couple of warnings:
- The end-result is really bulky and extremely geeky. You might want to think twice before wearing this on a first date.
- Let’s face it: The 4-digit display makes the whole thing look like a time-bomb. I’d think twice before wearingit at an airport!
That said, here are the steps I followed in pictures with captions. It literally took me less than an hour between opening the box and wearing the completed thing on my wrist and I’m definitely not a hardware person.
