Watchy is an affordable open-source e-paper smartwatch you can customise yourself

If you’ve been following tech for long enough, specifically wearable tech, then you’ll remember the Pebble. The original Kickstarter phenomenon sparked a serious wearable trend but the e-paper device wasn’t big on features. It’s still pretty unique, though — as is its spiritual successor, called Watchy.

Best of all, it’s designed to let you do a little tinkering of your own, ensuring that your Watchy really is as unique as you can make it.

Watchy what I can do

By which we mean: you’re going to have to put it together. The weird wearable is built around an ESP32 board which is mostly assembled. You’ll need to connect the screen and the battery — and make sure they stay connected. It can be customised with various 3D-printed cases, which is where a lot of the creativity will come in.

Watchy uses a 200 x 200 panel which is billed as e-paper but Gizmodo reckons it’s a low-power LCD instead. It features WiFi, Bluetooth, a haptics motor and a three-axis accelerometer — sadly, it doesn’t include tracking features. It’s a little basic for that. It uses the Arduino integrated development environment, which means you can programme it to do all sorts of things. Or you can download features someone else thought up, in case you’re terrible at bashing out code.

There’s no waterproofing for the device, however. Because… well, it arrives in bits. And costs far less than R1,000.

If you want one of your very own, it’ll cost you about R760 — or around $50. There is a special running at present but, wouldn’t you know it, the hardware is all sold out. If you simply must have one (or more), the company does ship to South Africa.

Source: Tindie via Gizmodo