The Psywatch

NOTE: this post will be updated (with dates) as progress is made.

August 5th 2026

Small update here, I finished the cad for the project. some nice progress tbh.

I also started soldering everything together and decided that rotating the watch 180 would make life eaiser. (screen on the left, bulk on right)

Some rapid form-adjusting disassembly (hacking away with hardened steel clippers) and the screen now takes up way less space. Future Eli will be happy.

Havent tested anything yet. Future me may not be too thrilled but oh well. That's his problem

I also started drawing out a full schematic for the electronics, and oh my god i love voltage dividers. A generational brain fart resulted in me writing a python script to brute force the formula.

There are not, infact, 3 unknown variables. only two. and the second one is just a mindset.

BTW the formula i speak of is: Vout = (R2*Vin)/(R1+R2)

I coulda just picked something for R1 but the python way is more fun. I think. :/

Anywho, I was planning on finishing this today. that did not happen. turns out locking in after a 45 hour work week at a restaraunt isnt that easy.

July 28th 2026

Run it back lol

today was a lot of design work, with some artistic renditions and actual CAD, printing away next to me.

As of now, all CAD is mostly done and most parts are sourced. something that I am disapointed with is that my screen did not come with a touchscreen IC.

That just means i dont need to add a button interface, which saves space and makes it look cleaner. buttons are more fun though.

No progress on software today, thats too much thinking. maybe ill put it on github and get someone to help out. build an open source watch lightweight OS.

not something I have the knowledge for. but thats something to learn. in the meantime, I need to expand my watch case to fit a battery and IMU, and I cannot decide if I want to put buttons on the edges of the watch, or on a front face. Decisions, decisions.

I am working a lot this week, but for my breaks I get time to write a lot of code. Almost like i get paid to do this. I am NOT looking forwards to finding time to film, edit and write a video while also working 40 hours. (Im gonna be at that restaraunt for at least 60 this week, and with travel that goes up to prob 70 hours.)

Not much time for this project. Maybe Ill do a little update instead? something lowkey. I am going to put less effort into the project updates, as most people dont want to look at techniacl stuff like that. My amazing intro for the psywatch video felt a bit wasted. shoutout lil bro for helping with that.

the first image i put up there, is of the grip texture on the part of the watch that touches my arm. that was done in onshape with a custom feature. (i think thas what it is called) literaly 2000 lines of what looks like gibberish. I hate CAD programming languages. Thats a future project. get good at that shit.

Anywho, next update in a few days. Goals for that one are:

Finalized CAD
Completed hardware
bare-bone code
order a RTC
aquire the IMU

July 27th 2026

Alright, a lot to go over in not that much space. If you haven't watched the first part youtube video I made, that's a good spot to start from.

A little refresher:

In high school, i made a "smart" watch that really never worked. the actual watch part was just a watch i had already, and it ended up just being a screen that told temperature and turned a flashlight on and off. not that exciting. I do still see this project as a success because its what got me into making things like this. The first version (i call it MK one (MK1)) used the raspberry pi foundations RP2040 chip on a Pico, powered from a 9v battery and with one of those 16x2 character LCD panels that come in every starter kit ever. the one thing i did succeed in was price, adding things up, the total was less than 30$ if i bought a RTC. last issues is style, It looks like an explosive. ever see the bomb from CS2? it has the same screen. all i was missing was the curly wires.

Design doc:

For the Psywatch MK2, I want a few things:

Gotta be cheap, less than $50.
wide range of connectivity (wifi, bluetooth, RF)
Practical / easy to use
needs some useful features (flashlight, IR LED / detector)
Visually interesting but also out of the way. (wear in public)
lastly, it needs to be a good platform to build off of.

my goal is to have enough hardware features that I can expand functionality with a few more lines of code.

more specific requirements:

last a full two days on one charge
some sort of automatic and manual screen off feature (gesture control)

Recent progress:

over the last two weeks I have been crunching away. I have all the libraries and software working, but not to full functionality. All parts have been sourced, so all I need to do now is rub out more software and CAD the whole thing together. the software is close, and I've gotten pretty good with onshape over the years so that should be a breeze. I'm hoping to be conceptually done tomorrow, so i can write a script while things are printing. And i gotta make sure to get some building B-roll for the video. Means i get to use some more of defectives awesome music.