When you got time on your side - create something

As we all settle down into the new norm of being housebound during this global epidemic, it’s given the opportunity to work on projects which would have remained on the back burner for an indefinite period.

As the eternal tinkerer, I’ve lately turned my attention to the Adruino community and all of the very interesting projects and possibilities that exist. One wearable electronics project that caught my eye a number of months back was a wristwatch project which I spotted on the Adafruit site here. Of course, ordering the parts was the easy part. What I found in the meantime is that my soldering iron was also kaput and I could not for the life of me find any of the wires, solder and other electronics tools. So alongside the box full of electronics components, I ordered a shiny new soldering iron, essentials for soldering and a few different types of glue.

And the last important piece of this jigsaw puzzle was the watch band. I had been scouting around some time for a suitable band - something high quality, yet fashionable. I managed to purchase a fantastic Kapital (Japan) indigo velcro band from Grailed.

As all of the pieces were finally in my hands, what was missing was time. This past weekend, I was able to devote some time to prototyping and ultimately soldering together all of the pieces with some younger helping hands. Definitely my soldering skills were not what they used to be. But there was something special about sitting on my back porch in the spring sunshine stripping wires, and soldering. The most challenging part for me was not assembling the watch. rather it was gluing the straps to the back o the watch face in order to be able to mount it to the watch band. I had to try a few different glues with a lot of patience. I wasn’t keen on using E6000 glue due to it’s toxicity…and rather opted to use a non-toxic glue from Aleene’s. Not sure how it will hold up in the long term though - time will tell (pun intended). Above is a photo of the watch connected to it’s USB “umbillical cord” for power and to load sketch (code).

And this is how it looks on my arm running off of a mini LiPo battery (also courtesy of Adafruit).

Tinkering is fun!