A project for all time #watches @molecularist

Charlie at Molecularist writes:

Some great projects are very personal. Or, at least, only the maker really understands the driving forces that led to the creation. And, yes, this is one of those.

Not sure when it happened, but the thought of measuring time in different ways got stuck in my head. Basically, there’s the old saying “Someone with one clock knows the time, someone with two is never sure.”

So I took that thought and figured all the ways I could show time in a compact construction, and it rolled on from there.

I had a few watches around. Two of them are the self-winding kind. And one was an old Timex digital watch. That got me going, so I thought I’d add an RTC that I had lying around and, since I had a WiFi capable board, I could do NTP. Then, along the way, I ended up with a straight analog digital watch (that one has a special story, too).

The project is controlled by a TinyPICO  which drives the round displays and the stepper for the self winding watch.

The Arduino IDE only uses one core. But there is a way to make a process work on the second core. And it was soooo easy. So I ended up putting the screen drawing on one core and the stepper on the other. And the two could merrily chug along without any conflicts.

And the project uses beautiful 3D prints for the base.

See the full details in the post here.