
Building a Wooden Word Watch for My Roommates - rcarmo
http://imgur.com/a/TNoh2
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pimlottc
This is really cool and impressive, but doing a kickstarter seems rather
ambitious. To go from your first ever embedded project and two hand-made
watches to delivering 179+ watches by November? That's a tall order. And
there's not a whole lot of details on the campaign page of how he's planning
to pull this all off.

By all means, keep making them, but I would start small, taking just a few
orders a time, before opening it up to mass production. Clearly he's a pretty
capable and resourceful guy, I'm just worried he's biting off more than he can
chew.

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Iv
I would normally agree but if this guy learned CAD, PCB layout, embedded
programming and design just for this project, I say he can pull it out. This
is very impressive.

~~~
StavrosK
As someone who did the same, I share the grandparent's apprehension. These
skills are fantastic to have and very fun to acquire, but shipping products
requires more skill than that.

Maybe I'm intimidated by the unknown unknowns (I was intimidated by learning
all these skills in the first place, but it was much easier than I thought),
but I think shipping a product at scale is rather hard if you haven't done it
before.

At least, he'll have to deal with flaky suppliers, parts not fitting properly
with each other, unforeseen costs, etc. I would feel much more comfortable if
he had used a PCBA service to produce assembled PCBs (pretty cheap even if you
don't want to do bulk orders) and a fabrication service for the face (harder
to do if not in bulk?).

Best of luck to him, though, it seems like a fun project, and I want to make
my own wall clock now.

~~~
Iv
Well, I think you are indeed afraid of the unknown unknows. There are more
skills to acquire for him to achieve this, but he proved that he can acquire
them, so godspeed!

By suggestion for him would be to check a few videos about how to manufacture
small scale things in Shenzhen, spend a week or two there, and roll with a
factory that specializes in low volumes.

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Jedd
The hand/home-made engineering is mightily impressive, but it's worth noting
that the design is not original [1].

[1]
[http://qlocktwo.com/info_w.php?lang=en](http://qlocktwo.com/info_w.php?lang=en)

~~~
hnlmorg
You could argue that the wooden finishing is as much a part of the design as
the watch face itself.

Besides, what is truly original these day? The best you can do is create
something you like that you haven't seen before and hope it hasn't already
been patented.

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madmax108
I did something like this in code when I just started exploring vue.js:
[https://codepen.io/anon/pen/ayKgeK](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/ayKgeK)

Really nifty that someone made a hardware model of this! :)

~~~
StavrosK
The original was a hardware clock, this is a conversion of that.

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blt
This is cool, well done for a school project and also a really nice thing to
do for one's roommates!

~~~
Overtonwindow
Totally gobsmacked that he built it himself. I don't care if it isn't
"original" that's some great engineering talent.

