 Oh God, this is it? A smartwatch? But it just, ah! Oh yeah, look, there it is, it's still keeping time. Wearables. Some of them are okay, but a lot of them are less okay between their unintuitive interfaces, patchy app compatibility, subpar battery life, and nasty habit of phoning home with all of your most intimate details. It is no wonder that someone finally said it. Forget this, I'm gonna build my own smartwatch with Blackjack and with this message from our sponsor. SmartDeploy enables IT admins to manage PCs from the cloud. You can push windows, apps, BIOS updates, and security patches to any device without leaving your desk. Get your exclusive free software worth over $800 at smartdeploy.com slash Linus. I'm gonna be upfront. We didn't do this for the first time. We're gonna be doing this for the first time. We're gonna be doing this for the first time. I'm gonna be upfront, we didn't do this whole thing on our own. In fact, all we really did was print ourselves a neat watch case and wrist strap. But what's cool about this project is that we could make this watch if we wanted to. Both the hardware and the software are completely open source. And the name of the project you ask, I'm glad you did. It's Open Source Smartwatch. It's a good name. Paul Smith, the lead is a full stack cloud developer by day, maker by night, and you might think that someone who works in cloud computing would have wanted every aspect of their project to synchronize with cloud servers. But it's actually quite the opposite. While wearables might not be on your radar, the biggest tech giants in the world have latched onto them, and for good reason. Besides being an ever present link to your smartphone, they're the perfect opportunity to load somebody up with sensors. And while those sensors can do extremely valuable things like measure your heart rate or your movement, the unseen bonus for these tech companies is the absolute treasure trove of data that can be harvested from them. That is what made Paul so uncomfortable. Starting back in 2018 then, he began with an E-ink display, an older ESP module, and a handful of surface mount components. The first test meal might not have been the prettiest thing in the world, but it was clearly a strong start because look where we are just a few short years later. Like, look at this thing. It's a little on the bulky side, but damn, it's wearable. You know, like, cause it's a wearable, get it? But I just mean it's not luggable. Like it's, it's wearable. Little rough around the edges, literally. Like, ow. But there it is. The goal was to make a watch that supported modern conveniences, GPS, maps, and tracking, but stored the data locally on a micro SD card. And Paul has actually got all of that going, but the version that I'm wearing is the Lite Edition. That means no GPS or SD expansion, but it also means a smaller PCB and therefore body size. As far as the software goes, there are a few watch faces and some hardware demos, but that's about it. Now the Lite Edition here started out as a side quest, but has become a pretty popular one. Just a few days ago, PCB manufacturer, LilyGo, made a trial run of these watch assemblies that sold out within minutes. And that bodes really well for getting this hardware into the hands of a community of people that will build upon Paul's work and develop new software for it. But then let's say they do that, what would you get? Every part of our watch is 3D printed, even the flexible strap, which before we did this video, I didn't even know that you could print such rugged flexible things. That's super neat. At first glance here, we've got a 200 by 200 pixel round IPS display. Of course, it's not quite 4,000 pixels, because it's round, but it looks pretty good from all angles and has more than ample brightness. Below that, we've got four buttons and a micro USB port for data transfer and charging. The top left button is reset. Then the other three are utility buttons that vary depending on what app you're using. And I gotta say, I am so glad to see hardware buttons. Like I use my pebble time for music control when I'm on my motorcycle and it's like tactile buttons. Hello, sometimes I wear gloves. On this one then, if we long press the lower left button like so, we get a little white square that pops up. And then on release, we change pages. So far, there are only six pages, the watch face, a stopwatch, a connection test to link to the wifi you configured, a ball and crosshair test for the accelerometer. This could kind of pass for a game, right? How long can you hold your arm level? And finally, some system info. Paul was also nice enough to do a custom page for us that actually plays our intro, which is super neat. It has some issues. You can actually see there's a bit of artifacting in the beginning of the animation, but considering he slapped this together in 20 minutes, I think I'll give him a pass. Now, because it's not all sealed up with an insane amount of adhesive, all we have to do to take it apart is remove, I mean, we gotta get the strap working. And then all we have to do is take off these four screws to show you what's inside. iFixit score, 10 out of 10. Just like the shirts at lttstore.com will make you a 10 out of 10, if you know what I mean. Okay, so we just gotta give it a little pop-a-pop. Ooh, there's the screen. Ooh, gotta be careful. All right, there we go. So under the screen, you find the brains of the operation, or well, okay, actually it's on the underside of this. Oh, good Lord. Okay, I've completely ruined it, Collin. All the buttons fell out. There it is. That right there is the Open SmartWatch PCB in all of its glory. It's just 36 millimeters in diameter, so that's 1.4 inches for you Liberians, and its heart is this tiny little chip right here, the TT-GO32 Micro. It's a system and package module based on the ESP32 made by Expressif. The ESP line of chips has absolutely surged in popularity lately due to their low cost, large feature set, and diminutive size. This one in particular is actually even smaller than most of them, about half the area of a normal ESP32, measuring at just 13.3 by 19.2 millimeters. And this tiny powerhouse is an absolute bargain at around $7. Not only is it a very capable processor, you can even run Python on it, it has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a huge variety of open source tools and libraries to build upon. So it's a logical choice for someone who's bootstrapping a small device like this one. We've actually been using a relative of this guy in some of our own projects here at LMG. Now, we're not gonna go too deep into the PCB design here, because frankly, we're not qualified. However, the fine folks over at hackster.io have written an excellent breakdown of this entire board. So if you wanna dive into the components, we're gonna have that linked in the comments for you. To keep it simple though, this light version of the OpenSmartWatch packs a barometer, triaxial accelerometer, a real-time clock, and all of the power conversion and charging ICs that are needed to keep this thing running. And run it will. In fact, by Paul's calculations, the 450 milliamp hour single cell LiPo down here should give you up to 50 days of sleep time due to all the power conserving features that are built into the board, and the software. Although of course, feature creep like, say for example, watch faces that are more than just a thing moving like this are probably gonna reduce that. And guys, that's it. That's the whole thing, at least for the electronics side of it. For proof of concept, we pulled down some of the CAD files for the project and gave them a go ourselves in our Prusa SL1 resin printer, and made this case, which is a variant that supports 20 millimeter spring pin watch bands, and whoop, well, okay, we got the tolerances off just a little bit on that one, but hey, generally speaking, it feels a lot more finished because like, man, those resin printers, like basically feel so good. By the way, if you guys are into 3D printing, get subscribed because we have some really cool stuff in the works. We are making a case, and we're actually checking out a chocolate printer. Now, of course, for the average consumer today, the Open SmartWatch isn't very smart really at all. It doesn't even have on-risk notifications. So pretty much all it does is tell the time, which means you might be wondering why we bothered to feature it on Linus Tech Tips. The reason is that we really like Paul's Moxie. Paul thinks that you should at least have the choice to keep your data to yourself, and we want to see this project become a success. Yeah, there's no app store, but there's also no microtransactions, no monthly access plans, and no cloud phoning home. Just a cool tech project that we are rooting for along with other similar ones like the Pine Time, which is made by the same folks that brought us the Pine Phone that you saw on Short Circuit, and the Watchie. Both of those are also open source. These sorts of projects hardly ever get the same sort of traction that big consumer bucks can bring to a device, but it's really important to us that they continue to exist. So guys, if you've got the time and you've got the skills, reach out to the developers in the link below if you want to help them move forward. And while you're down looking at the links below, maybe move forward with building your own website with our sponsor, Squarespace. With Squarespace, it's easy to make your own website, and it can do almost anything. They've got award-winning templates that'll help make your website stand out instead of looking like it's from the 90s. And if you're looking to open a business online selling products, they have you covered there too. Squarespace can help you showcase what you're selling in a modern style, and they've got inventory management with no limit to how many items you can sell. Even we use Squarespace. Both linusmediagroup.com and ltxxpo.com were built quickly using Squarespace. Actually, we put so little effort into those sites. Squarespace really is fantastic. And if you get stuck, they've got a 24-7 support team that is ready to help you out. So go to squarespace.com slash ltt and get 10% off today. We hope you guys enjoyed us taking a look at this neat little watch project. And if you like sort of out there wearables, why not take a look at our video covering the Nubia Alpha, a device that I absolutely loved, even though objectively speaking, it was just atrocious. It's really bad.