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Comment by cbm-vic-20 | Hacker News Reader

I just wanted to call out how cool it is to replace the guts of a 1980s-era wristwatch with a ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller, while reusing the original display and buttons.

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One of my long-term hacker project goals is to replace the guts of an analog watch with a microcontroller and turn it into a "smartwatch-lite". There's a surprising amount of information and features you can display with three pointers (and a small numeric window): temperature, heartrate and other body sensors, NFC to replace payment or access cards, etc.

Not as customizable as what I'm sure you're planning, but Withings makes watches with that design direction

https://www.withings.com/us/en/watches

Yep there are plenty of watches like that (for example Fossil I think), but I'd really like to take a nice vintage watch and build a hackable watch platform myself.

Yeah, I had a Withings semismart watch, one of their cheaper models without a screen. It integrated a pedometer, and had a dial had that would show steps taken, it moved from 0 to 100% of your goal. One had to pair it to the Withings Android app to set not just the goal for number of steps/day, but even for setting the time.

I sold it after a few months, realizing how much I missed a second hand and a glow-in-the-dark face. Also, the app had a ton of telemetry going back to Withings.

Building your own you would be in full control of the data.

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