Casio F-91W watch converted into a smartwatch

Electronic enthusiasts interested in upgrading a classic Casio wristwatch, transforming it into a hackable, programmable smartwatch may be interested in the Sensor Watch object over on the Crowd Supply website after initially raising over $45,000 thanks to over 700 backers the unique smartwatch project is now available to preorder with prices starting from just $36.

Casio smartwatch

“Sensor Watch is a bridge between eras. It takes an iconic 30-year-old design from a golden age of digital watches, and pairs it with a modern, powerful microcontroller and state-of-the-art sensing capabilities. This small circuit board, less than an inch in diameter, replaces the original quartz movement in a Casio F-91W watch to put the capabilities of an ultra-low-power ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller on your wrist.”

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“Sensor Watch is not like most smart watches. It makes a different set of engineering tradeoffs, to achieve a different set of goals:

Instead of a high-resolution TFT LCD, Sensor Watch repurposes the Casio F-91W’s monochrome segment LCD. This gives it an always-on display that consumes mere microamperes of power.
By avoiding power hungry features like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Sensor Watch can run for a year or more on a single 100 mAh coin cell, eliminating the need for frequent recharging.
The lack of an external charging port, coupled with reuse of the F-91W’s famously water resistant enclosure, makes this a hackable wristwatch that can handle depths up to 30 meters.”

“There are others (stopwatch, pulsometer, battery voltage), but the important thing isn’t the apps that come with Sensor Watch. The important thing is that Sensor Watch is open source and easily hackable, which means you can write the apps that make sense for YOU. Do you want an astronomy face that can show you moon phase and predict satellite passes? A transit face programmed with train arrivals for your nearest subway station? An astrology face that can tell you if Mercury is in retrograde? These are all apps that you could write for Sensor Watch.”