The End of the Beginning

Reflecting on my Chron-x, smartwatch project

It’s the end of the semester, and I’ve gone having from a promising idea to designing, coding, and building it from scratch. While I’ve built a watch before, this is the first “smart” project I’ve worked on, and it came out better than I hoped. Here’s why.

What it Is

Chron-x is a Bluetooth-enabled smartwatch that can receive notifications from your phone once connected via an app. In addition to normal watch features (telling date/time), it has the following features:

Notifications

Once paired with app on phone over Bluetooth, notifications from your phone will be sent to the watch. In addition to notifications, the time on your phone can also be sent to Chron-x to keep the time updated.

Charging/Updating the Code

Charging and updating the codebase is made easy by the Adafruit ItsyBitsy. A MicroUSB cable can be plugged into Chron-x to charge the battery and update the code on the microcontroller.

Dim Mode

Using the on-board accelerometer, the orientation of the watch can be detected, so when you aren’t looking at the watch, the watch screen dims to conserve power. The orientation values were determined experimentally, so this feature is still under development and can be improved.

Future Improvements

• Health monitoring: With the on-board accelerometer, health statistics such as footsteps and level of exercise can be detected. While these are large features and implementing this in code would take some time, health features and smartwatches have become ubiquitous, so it would make sense to include them.
• More apps: What would be better than a game of pong on Chron-x? Sadly, it doesn’t exist yet, but it could given the simple framework I’ve created to build apps.
• Better casing: I had to assemble the case in 2 days. With more time, I could build a less boxy version.
• Optimize the code: The current code uses dynamic memory, which is generally frowned upon in Arduinos. I’ll remove this to optimize the amount of memory I have to work with on the watch.

It’s a long list of improvements, but some work could transform this from classroom project to a DIY project that people around the world could try to make. I plan to continue developing this project, put a tutorial on Instructables, and hopefully receive contributions from the open source community to keep making this project better.