
I made a smart watch from scratch - mnem
https://m.imgur.com/a/FSBwD3g
======
dan1234
Here’s the Reddit thread with more feedback from the creator[0]. Amazingly
gets a week between charges[1]

[0][https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...](https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartwatch_from_scratch/)

[1][https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartw...](https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/bivyok/i_made_a_smartwatch_from_scratch/em3sqbv/)

~~~
iscrewyou
Thank you for including old in the reddit url!

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
What does adding "old" do?

~~~
hotgeart
You'll get the 'old' design. Check with your "private mode" browser :

\- [https://www.reddit.com/](https://www.reddit.com/) \-
[https://old.reddit.com/](https://old.reddit.com/)

~~~
tim333
Interesting those have not only different designs but also different stories
for me. I prefer the old one.

------
tambourine_man
My first reaction when I read the title was to complete the sentence in my
mind: “…and it sucks”.

But I'm very glad I was wrong in my scepticism. This is freaking amazing on so
many levels.

Edit: It’s been a while since I’ve been so excited about a project. Now I
can’t work just thinking of taking a month off to play with this thing :)

~~~
adriansky
Do it! What would you build if you take a month off?

~~~
harias
Not OP, but I would build a better CRM. The present solutions are far from
intelligent.

~~~
uh_yikes
I am also very interested in this. Mind sharing some of your ideas?

------
js2
We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-
piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design,
manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly
remarkable progress in some very specific ways.

~~~
mensetmanusman
Homelessness: unsolvable in a society where it is illegal to force someone to
take care of themselves (by being sheltered). The west has decided that
individual freedom is worth the cost of some people using it to choose to be
homeless. I think this legal framework will make it impossible to solve
homelessness.

Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and
objective well being. A majority of millionaires do not think they are rich. I
think this psychology will make it impossible to solve poverty.

Cancer: Entropy/cosmic rays scrambling DNA... I think thermodynamics will make
it impossible to solve cancer (as in, all cancer) for everyone (very rich with
DNA repair therapy in the medium/near future).

War: Actually living now in the most peaceful time in human history as a % of
humans in conflict. I think the human desire for power/wealth (again, back to
poverty) will make it impossible to solve the zero war scenario. At least
nukes scared everyone from the big wars so far :)

~~~
twaddler
Poverty versus homelessness is an interesting cognitive reframing of the same
fundamental problem.

War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in
general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of
individuals to transcend to rival collectives.

So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for
some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth again.

Here’s where I’d like to stop for a moment, and dispense with the conceptual
curveballs being tossed around, because now with wealth as a requirement for
diamond sure shots against cancer being accessible only to the wealthy, we’re
right back onto the homelessness/poverty concept.

I’m going to cut to the chase: the words “ _illegal to force someone to take
care of themselves_ ” is an extremely misguided framing of what homelessness
is. Almost to the point of willful deception. That _ain’t_ what homelessness
is.

Okay, sure. You’ve got psychiatric, fractured people walking around in
circles, and lead a horse to water, do no harm, you’re idea of compelled
assistance is my idea of a cage, and what about all the sociopaths who might
game the system like blood sucking parasites. Healthy people need not be beset
by the lampreys of willful destruction and self destruction.

But.

The U.S. Marshalls and/or the town sheriff’s department will trot on up to my
door with cuffs in hand, and guns drawn, within 45 days of my bank telling
someone that I haven’t scored enough paper points to pay tribute to the
monarch of my roof. So, under threat of violence, not only is the degree of
luxury stripped from my permission to simply exist comfortably, but perhaps I
land in a cage. A real cage, not a conceptual economic cage of taxes and
regulation. A cage shared with some of the fractured psych cases that might
fracture me to match their proclivities and better suit their surroundings.

So, poverty. Back to wealth, yes? Points scored on paper, retained by banks
that publish scores to highly available, networked computer databases for live
transactions and batch processing.

We’re rapidly approaching a situation where electronic systems, computer
software, and related hardware applications will obviate human effort in a
wide array of scenarios. Transportation, anything involving sorting,
organizing and distribution, rote fabrication and assembly; much of that can
be automated, with or without magic decision making buzzwords for the edge
cases that are currently mechanical turked with brute force data entry by
humans in the loop.

This reorganization, centralized around advanced electronic systems of record
and authority will drastically improve efficiency, to simultaneously create
surplus and idle humans in one stroke, or many, many concurrent strokes,
struck within a very fast, short span of time.

Now, broken humans, stupid humans, evil humans, and even just plain old
humans, mediocre, unfuckable, and aged out; such a chore to be around and
listen to. Why do anything for anyone that can’t charm your pants off? And
then, there’s the biosphere to think about. Do we use automation to unleash a
surplus of pollution, garbage, waste and toxicity upon our already fragile
planet, but for the want of maximizing a bottomless pit of human activity?
Indeed, when we play god, and cure cancer, feed the poor and house the
homeless, do we even fix the ugly, mean freaks that no one finds adorable or
even mildly interesting?

I think we can draw a bounding box around an extrapolation of all living
humans in their current state of affairs, and what it would take to raise the
standard of living, and provide a comfortable pasture for all the broken
shambles of misfortune that creates poverty and all the mental illness that
creates homelessness. We’ll probably even have enough surplus to snip out all
those pesky tumors, and mend the festering sores that sprout more. We’ll
probably be able to figure this stuff out, granted that biology is merely
piles of chemistry, which of course is merely piles of physics, and that
highly efficient resource sharing will produce idle humans bathed in surplus,
many of whom will be pretty smart, healthy and motivated. My, that’s
optimistic, isn’t it?

So, I dunno. I don’t see things your way, but then again, I have to spend
eight or more exhausting hours a day, on this treadmill of income chasing to
pay rent, eat food, run fool’s errands, commute, idle in front of a cathode
ray tube, psychically recovering from the trauma of the stupidity inflicted
upon me by this shitty mess of a groundhog’s day rat race, and then sleep for
eight hours, so I’m actively prevented from helping you solve the problems you
attempt to frame as so bloody insurmountable.

C’est la vie...

~~~
mensetmanusman
Thanks for the comment,

I was being a bit flippant in my comment because I take issue with the
phrasing of these problems in the context of 'solutionism.'

We can, and have, eased poverty. Families aren’t having to eat their children
as happened in 1920's Russia. We must strive to ease it our entire lives to
add meaning, even if we know we will never reach the asymptote for the reasons
I mentioned,

We must strive to ease war. Does that mean having a strong police-like
presence in the Middle East, or just getting the fuck out? Our own society
arose like a Phoenix from extreme violence, at we harming less developed
countries by constant intervention in their sectarian violence?

We must strive to ease cancer, because we have to solve this before the heat
death of the sun if we wish for humanity to survive afterwards.

Peace be with you

------
ConfusedDog
I was expecting a brick on wrist, but this surprised me! And the circuit looks
simple. I love the charging dock and textual of the watch frame! Screen
resolution is a bit low though. I'd join if there's an open source community
dedicated to work on this stuff, I think there's a lot of room improve the OS
and software. I'm glad to have seen this!

~~~
swalladge
> I was expecting a brick on wrist, but this surprised me!

Agreed, I can't believe how thin and professional it is! This has to be the
most mind blowing thing I've seen for a long time. :O

------
scoutt
The DA14683 is fantastic. I played a bit with an eval. board and it's really
good for it's price vs. features (~$3 for 250 pcs. at Mouser). But soon the
idea of releasing code for it as Open Source faded away, since you need to
sign an SLA ([https://support.dialog-
semiconductor.com/connectivity/reques...](https://support.dialog-
semiconductor.com/connectivity/request-access-restricted-content)), that
limits the way source code based on their in SDK is released (only to your
customer, in an only “need to know” basis). I hate when this happens.

I wonder how the creator of this watch managed to publish the source code,
including the Dialog SDK; if there is a _backdoor_ I am missing.

~~~
opencl
Probably by ignoring the license.

~~~
echlebek
Pretty reasonable way to solve this problem really. Are they really going to
bring the hammer down on a hobbyist?

~~~
ISO-morphism
I share a hatred for this sort of thing that happens all too often the closer
you get to hardware, mainly as a byproduct of the culture. However, refusing
to adhere to a proprietary license damages respect for all software licenses,
especially the GPL, in the global software community. Depending on where you
fall on the anarchy vs rule-of-law scale that may or may not be a good thing.

Flip side of the argument: "Someone wrote a GPL library I want to use but I
don't want to release my source. Is anyone really going to notice, care, or
bother to bring the hammer down on my company?"

------
jordan_clark
I googled and added it up (just out of curiosity) using the BOM, and total
cost was ~$88USD (not counting shipping)

Also, the OS is FreeRTOS (Open sourced by AWS/Amazon in '17) if anyone is
interested

~~~
closetohome
Or like $6800 depending on how you value your time.

~~~
umvi
Or like $400,000+ if you are hiring a team of mechanical, electrical and
software engineers to design an make it for you because neither you nor any
individual on your team has his entire set of skills.

Or like $1,000,000+ if you are hiring some company to design and build it for
you

------
michaelmior
I would have been impressed with anything functional, but to me this actually
looks nicer than the vast majority of commercially produced smart watches.
Awesome!

~~~
blinky1456
The Samsung smart watches look really nice to me, I don't know how decent they
are in real life though since I don't own one.

~~~
parthdesai
While it's not a proper smartwatch, i find withings' (Nokia) hybrid
smartwatch[0] to be really aesthetically pleasing.

[0]: [https://www.withings.com/ca/en/steel-
hr](https://www.withings.com/ca/en/steel-hr)

~~~
zius
I am wearing one right now and it’s amazing - Especially it’s battery life
(easily 1 month+). I get loads of compliments about this watch. The feature
set is just enough for my needs, even though I considered getting an Apple
Watch. The app is also more than decent.

~~~
bluehatbrit
I had one of the original Withings watches (before Nokia bought them out) and
it lasted about a year until it stopped reliably keeping time. It got to the
point where I was doing hard resets and changing the battery every few weeks
and I gave up in the end. I was really disappointed, it looks beautiful and
worked so well for a year and then became totally useless. I spent a good £200
on it as well if I recall correctly.

Withings were empathetic but took a long time to respond to my tickets and
eventually I just gave up. I've still got it because I can't bring myself to
get rid of it. I loved that it looked like an analogue watch, got lots of
compliments on it and everyone was surprised when they found out it counted
steps (etc) as well.

Are the recent ones better? I'd consider getting the new one that looks like
the old Withings Activite if it holds up to the claims on the box.

~~~
blattimwind
> Especially it’s battery life (easily 1 month+)

> I had one of the original Withings watches (before Nokia bought them out)
> and it lasted about a year until it stopped reliably keeping time. It got to
> the point where I was doing hard resets and changing the battery every few
> weeks and I gave up in the end.

Worse is better. Changing batteries? Failure to keep time? Over 200 Euros for
a watch that doesn't last a year? Largely unheard of in the realm of automatic
watches.

------
SnowingXIV
This is really cool and as a software guy the electrical engineering component
is a huge black box to me. Circuit boards all connected up and getting a
physical device to handle lithium ion batteries to properly charge and not
blow up is beautiful. He does a great job with pictures, videos, and giving
detail at both a high level and semi-in-depth explanations really made it
shine.

Is there anyone that does similar type of posts? Or even a follow along type
of deal to get feet wet with actually building devices (maybe it includes a
list of items to buy first)? Don't get me wrong I love writing software but
showing someone something you physically made as opposed to sending a link to
a website seems so much more satisfying.

~~~
TheHideout
While I didn't give super detailed instructions, I posted something similar
for a cyberpunk face-shield prop I made [0]. I started with a cheap VR toy and
pretty much everything else is from Adafruit.

[0] [https://imgur.com/gallery/JOnd3H1](https://imgur.com/gallery/JOnd3H1)

------
tboerstad
This is nicely done, beautiful aesthetics. There are multiple phases (HW, SW,
Mechanics) which would be impressive enough on their own. Kudos!

Love the little gifs to explain how it's done, especially the stenciling of
the PCB.

I'm curious, how/why did you choose the DA14683 chip?

~~~
tboerstad
Quoting the OP from the reddit thread:

"I picked the MCU for a couple of reasons:

-Very low power transmit/receive for the bluetooth (<4mA). I get around a week of battery life

-Cheap

-High speed on the SPI bus. The display writes are limited by the SPI bus. It requires a 9-bit word (additional bit is used for data/command). So being able to run the SPI bus at 48MHz is clutch.

-Has PMIC integrated into chipset. I don't need to include additional circuitry for a buck-boost regulator or a lipo charger since the dialog part has it all built in!

-Cheap"

------
magashna
I'm annoyed that he made a watch from scratch and its wrist twist to show
screen timing is still faster than my smartwatch

~~~
bicx
What they don't show is how often it turns on when he doesn't want it to. That
was probably a tough calibration to make for other manufacturers, especially
when production smartwatches have much higher-resolution screens and
processors that drain battery.

~~~
alphakappa
That is absolutely correct. Figuring out when the watch is in an upright
position is trivial. Figuring out whether the user intended to actually get it
to turn on is extremely hard, and it involves looking at the history of motion
that preceded it, and making judgments based on a whole lot of user data.

The other problem is making the tradeoff between detecting this fast enough
(to turn on all the systems that follow so that the screen can light up fast
enough) and waiting long enough (so you can be extra sure that the user
intended to look at the screen)

The garden path is easy. Making it work mostly unobtrusively is very hard.

~~~
skummetmaelk
Also the power cost of running this analysis all the time can be higher than
just turning on the screen even though the user didn't "request" it.

------
moreentropy
The CCCamp 2019 badge will be a (low cost) smart watch called card10:

[https://gitlab.hamburg.ccc.de/card10/logix](https://gitlab.hamburg.ccc.de/card10/logix)

~~~
kkarakk
how do you interact with anyone presenting at/participating in CCC? does
everyone just meet on day of? i have a hard time reading any of their material
and there's never any links on who to ask questions to. OR do they just like
it that way

------
taoufix
I clicked thinking, this is just a guy who'll disassemble a smartwatch and put
his DIY housing and strap on it.

But man! I was so wrong, and I'm totally impressed.

------
Poiesis
To save folks a click, copy, and paste, the GitHub project is
[https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC](https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC)

------
pavlov
That is really lovely — and truly from scratch, including the software!

The first photo looks a lot like Android Wear, so first I assumed this would
be using a prepackaged OS, but it isn't!

The source code is in on Github alongside schematics, PCB files and everything
else:
[https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC/tree/master/So...](https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC/tree/master/Software)

------
diimdeep
Tony Stark level DIY

~~~
logicallee
yeah very impressive. Is this how products are really prototyped? I feel he
could have mentioned either 20 years of experience in all parts of this field
(if that's how come he could do it so cleanly) or if he did actual prototyping
steps he could have mentioned them or showed some pictures. From the pictures,
it comes off as something anyone can do in a week or two. like building a
table.

Maybe I'm wrong and the pictures do do the process justice?

Either way definitely amazing.

~~~
blihp
It's pretty clear the author knows what they're doing and pretty much anytime
I see a post like this I assume they are (smartly) doing some self-marketing
rather than a 'see how easy/cool this project is?' So it's part 'look at this
nice watch I made' and part 'look at what I could be doing for _your_
product'. Far better than just saying 'designed and built a smart watch' on
the resume.

~~~
logicallee
oh, got it. I don't know if it's true or not but that is a really good
assessment. I was really perplexed by the part where he says "now here are
some boring circuits, feel free to skip this". Like, who would skip that? What
you've written makes perfect sense though.

------
cssbubble
This is so awesome. It is a good learning and inspiring for others. I will add
this project to DIY section of the Learn-awesome repository
[https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome](https://github.com/learn-
awesome/learn-awesome). Please add such valuable resources here.

------
simias
Very impressive and inspiring.

I've been thinking about making a custom keyboard for a while now but, while I
have no problems with the electronic and software side of things, I'm a bit
overwhelmed with the 3D modelling required.

I tried learning Blender but it really feels ill-suited for designing physical
objects. The author mentions considering openSCAD but I've heard pretty bad
things about it so I haven't really given it a chance yet.

The person making the dactyl keyboard had a very interesting talk where he
explain how he basically ended up writing his own DSL in clojure on top of
openSCAD, maybe I should try that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4)
(if you enjoyed TFA you'll probably like this video as well, it's a step-by-
step explanation of how he designed his dream keyboard).

Otherwise I suppose I'll have to betray rms and try this freeware Fusion 360
thing.

~~~
allanrbo
OpenSCAD actually comes pretty natural if you are used to writing code

~~~
skummetmaelk
OpenSCAD is nice for simple geometry, but products today never have simple
geometry. Doing bevels in openSCAD is a nightmare for example, and bevels are
everywhere.

------
foldor
I'm still disappointed that new smart watch development has seemingly stalled
in progress as of late. I was hoping that by this time we'd have watches that
had 24 hour battery life, and an always on display that didn't need a flick of
the wrist to activate. I hoped that wouldn't be asking for much, but I guess
it's harder than I assumed.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That thing unfortunately seems to have died with Pebble.

~~~
wlesieutre
Amazfit is the closest player to Pebble's old space. I don't think they have
any 3rd party app ecosystem at all, but the baseline experience covers time,
notifications, workout tracking, and a couple other things.

Bip and Stratos are the watchier lines, they also have more minimal Fitbit
strap-style product that I forget the name of.

EDIT: Here's another new entry
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/garmin-revamps-
entir...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/garmin-revamps-entire-
forerunner-family-new-smartwatches-start-at-199/)

 _> Like most Garmin smartwatches, the Forerunner 45 and 45S track all-day
activity and sleep, deliver smartphone alerts to your wrist, and are easy on
the eyes thanks to an always-on, sunlight-friendly display. Even though the
Forerunner 45 watches are the most affordable of the bunch, they still have a
heart-rate monitor and built-in GPS, so users can make outdoor runs without
the help of a smartphone._

 _> It can also connect to external sensors like a running dynamics pod and
heart-rate chest straps to capture more running data while you train. The
Forerunner 245 watches have the same one-week battery life as the Forerunner
45 watches do when in smartwatch mode, but they'll last up to 24 hours in GPS
mode or six hours when using GPS and music playback simultaneously._

That looks really promising.

~~~
sbradford26
Currently wearing an Amazfit Bip and I really like it. I got one for my Dad to
replace his Pebble Time Steel and he loved it so much I got one. I usually get
around 20+ days of battery life and it does everything I need, aka sleep
tracking, notifications, and activity tracking.

------
vkaku
It's interesting to know how one can build the one thing for about ~$80 even
in small quantities, and everything is available, incl Source.

If people started selling the pre-soldered board as a smart-watch starter kit
on Aliexpress , pretty sure someone would buy it.

This is the sort of thing that would make DIY popular, I can see why.

------
qhwudbebd
Very nice job! I love reading about hardware projects like this but stumble
across the write-ups much less frequently/reliably compared to interesting
software projects. Are there good groups/lists/sites to hear about more
electronic/hardware hacking like this?

~~~
linuxftw
All sorts of interesting projects on Hackaday:
[https://hackaday.com/](https://hackaday.com/)

------
StavrosK
What a great project! I love how much attention to detail he put in.
Fantastic, this is exactly the kind of thing I love studying and working on
myself.

Sidenote, I'm a bit disappointed that people use imgur to showcase their
projects, as I don't think it's very good for that. I built
[https://www.makerfol.io/](https://www.makerfol.io/) for this exact purpose
but people seem to still prefer imgur for some reason, and I'm not sure why :/

~~~
frenchy
FYI, the gravatar images don't load on my browser because I have Firefox's
content blocker enabled. The alt-text "The user's avatar" is showing in a
bunch of places, and on the project list it overlaps with the project titles.
I'd recommend:

* Replacing "The user's avatar" at the top with the user's name. * On the project list, just setting the alt-text to "".

Otherwise: nice site.

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, thank you, but removing the alt-text would be bad for accessibility. It
_is_ meant for visually impaired people, after all. Maybe setting the title
would fix this, I'll look into it, thank you!

~~~
laken
The alt-text "The User's Avatar" is worse for accessibility than an _empty_
alt-text (not no alt-text, empty alt text).

Alt-text is to describe non-decorative images that add meaning. The parent
commenter is correct on how you would implement accessible alt-text here.

In the top, your avatar is meant to to represent a link to your profile. That
needs an alt attribute. The alt attribute should be the current user's name,
"Your Profile", or something similar. When signed out, something like "Sign
In" might work better.

In the featured projects, the avatar that's there is decorative. The litmus
test for decorative images is that if the image wasn't there, would you be
able to easily figure out what to do? The image is purely decorative, as the
creator's name is adjacent to it. There you would add an empty alt tag, like
`alt=""` (not the same as no alt text), as screen-readers know to ignore that
image then.

~~~
StavrosK
I see, thank you, I'll change them then.

~~~
laken
No problem! Alt text is super confusing if you don't do it often, and there's
a lot of untrue assumptions out there about it :)

I highly recommend this page by WebAIM on it:
[https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/](https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/)

~~~
StavrosK
This is extremely useful, thank you!

------
adriansky
This is so cool. I've never heard of that microcontroller though. It has nice
features and applications. Datasheet of the microcontroller he used:
[https://www.dialog-
semiconductor.com/sites/default/files/sma...](https://www.dialog-
semiconductor.com/sites/default/files/smartbondtm_da146823_product_brief_hr.pdf)

------
zaarn
Considering there is still no good replacement for my Pebble Time, I might use
this manual to build my own. The Rebble team might also be interested in this.

~~~
scottydelta
I have been looking for a replacement since the day Fitbit shutdown the pebble
services. I am glad that Rebble team took over some of the services but it
would still be nice to find a replacement. what do you think of wearOS based
devices like fossil sport or Ticwatch pro?

I have been looking at this wiki to identify a few good replacements to pebble
time:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOS/wiki/watches](https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOS/wiki/watches)

~~~
zaarn
I'm not a fan of any of the sports-focused replacement watches that seem to
compete against the Pebbles. The Fossil Sport seems to lack a eInk Display and
the vendor only promises 24 hour battery time.

The TicWatch seems to manage 40 Hours, something which my recently Pebble Time
with a half dead battery achieved.

The main reason I'm severely disappointed in the market is the lack of long
battery lifetime devices. And those that do run for a week on a single charge
usually lack in other parts of the product.

And after all that, it's all so expensive. A Pebble Time costs around 60€ to
80€ used on Ebay, and that is after they went out of production. Most
competitors don't go that low!

------
deadelvis
Congrats! Making it round was a good design decision! Who would think a square
(or squircle) watch is good watch design anyway? ;)

------
srndh
On a related note, I was reminded of Woz's Nixie watch -
[https://youtu.be/m4R3hODnTGo](https://youtu.be/m4R3hODnTGo)

------
aceperry
Great project. I'm amazed at how much you can accomplish with today's tools
and services. And using the woodfill PLA is a good way to get around the rough
look of 3D printers. Great ideas here.

------
Havoc
Wow - that's an impressive project. Ambitious and well executed.

...only part that had me confused was using like 25% of screen real estate for
showing time and putting flowers on the other 75%. Artistic I guess.

~~~
kenward
My guess is he hasn't gotten to scaling the text sizes yet. It looks like all
the text is the same font-size.

I think in the Reddit thread, he mentioned having to draw each character
(lower-case and upper-case) pixel-by-pixel for the display.

------
ghostbrainalpha
The design of the charger is shockingly good. I would prefer that 10x to my
apple charger disk that is constantly slipping off.

------
azhenley
Looks good. Time for you to do a Kickstarter!

------
posterboy
If you have scratch and junk lying around, why not make a watch from it?

~~~
serf
that's sorta the thinking that makes me take issue from the phrase 'from
scratch'.

it's a nice project, but in my vocabulary 'from scratch' doesn't mean "after
an initial engineering and design phase i'll order a host of parts from a
company', it means 'i'd better start wrapping memory cores, let me get the
copper wire out.'

------
polpenn
How much harder would it be to build an ebook reader?

~~~
naraic0o
I suppose that depends on your requirements, but people have done similar
things: [https://orbides.org/book.php](https://orbides.org/book.php)

------
debt
How did he get that screen?

~~~
Luc
The part number is in the Bill Of Materials file on his github repo:

[https://www.dhgate.com/product/aml130a2402a-1-3-inch-240-240...](https://www.dhgate.com/product/aml130a2402a-1-3-inch-240-240-round-
tft-lcd/413771628.html)

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p1esk
Be sure to read the comments on imgur, made my day :)

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jshowa3
This is crazy.

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candidera
Hi guys, how are you?

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mshockwave
this is REALLY great, i hope i can give two upvotes!

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ahmetyas01
so you are the engineer at google?

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aw3c2
Bottom images seem photoshopped.

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tyingq
You mean the ones he specifically says are "rendered"? He mentions Fusion 360,
the CAD software he designed the case in.

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aw3c2
Ouch, stupid me. Sorry.

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duderific
I'll take "things people without kids do in their spare time" for 200, Alex.

~~~
skummetmaelk
"Comments people who wish they were capable of doing such a project make on
the internet for 800, Alex"

