./watch
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
dotslashwatch.comTechstoryHigh profile
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Diy ElectronicsWatch DesignEmbedded Systems
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Diy Electronics
Watch Design
Embedded Systems
The ./watch is a DIY digital watch project that showcases a unique design concept and sparks discussion on its aesthetics, functionality, and technical aspects.
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Oct 18, 2025 at 5:55 AM EDT
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While usually not on display, the quartz movements of Grand Seikos are beautifully finished:
* https://i.imgur.com/sJXfmg1.jpeg
* https://i.imgur.com/BucSW15.jpeg
* https://i.imgur.com/xVd04BM.jpeg
* https://i.imgur.com/wuRSif1.jpeg
using an app with a Fast Fourier Transform (e.g. https://github.com/woheller69/audio-analyzer-for-android ), you can visually compare the sounds of your watches
https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/
https://www.sensorwatch.net/
Wear mine every day. Contributed some improvements to the pulsometer and TOTP faces. Was even maintainer for a while. Really nice community. If you want something awesome to hack on, this is it.
https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005009235529767.html
https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005006734845748.html
You only need to prepend dotslash to a filename in order of disambiguate invocations of executables in the the current directory (and not a subdirectory).
This is because bare commands will be looked up in $PATH, rather than among executable files in $PWD.
It strikes me as weird copycat (without understanding) programming to just have it wherever you're referring to a local file. In fact I prefer to invoke `bash foo.sh` rather than `mv foo.sh foo; chmod +x foo.sh; ./foo.sh`. (This assumes that I don't need to rely on something special in the shebang line.) This also lets you use tab-completion as normal, as well as adding flags for bash like -x.
(I know you could use it for clarity when an argument could look like a string or a file, but I don't think that's usuaully the purpose.)
As an argument in a line? My shell offers completion from the current directory without ./ just fine.
Usually it's tab-complete adding the slash though, I don't go typing it in.
I also alias 'ls' to 'ls -F' so that directories have a / appended, makes it easier to understand the output.
For example in Go:
And then people don't want to think about when your path is for the shell and when it's a CLI param and how the CLI treats it, and just use the version that always works.Similarly, package installers can use this to disambiguate between "install the local file with this exact name" and "look up a file on the index for the named package".
In `go run` the CLI interprets it as universal path, to be precise. That's exactly the point.
> go run github.com/user/name/cmd/myapp
That's not an alternative when you're working on the app's code locally. You have to use `./cmd/myapp`.
And when you do that multiple times per day/week, after a while you just start always using `./` prefix for local paths.
For example
- go run go://cmd/foo
- go run file:///cmd/foo
So I think you and I differ on this one, but none of this is a hill I care to die on.
IMO the take away from command-line interfaces is compact, precise and minimal design. In a transitional shell prompt like #~$, each character has its meaning. Merely copying these symbols to a watch face is the exact opposite spirit of command like interfaces.
My favorite prompt is >: as a callback to the Swan computer in the TV show Lost (not sure if it's also used in early Apple computers).
3D0G to start basic from the Monitor
Most GUIs also have "endless" pages of options. Grouping them helps quite a bit.
Having many options is usually considered the trait of the rich and powerful. Studying them for the tools you use often may actually save time, compared to googling around the bush every time.
GUIs have discovery by definition, users have visual references where to click and possibly see some side effect taking place.
Apparently the UNIX way that gets thrown around the Internet doesn't agree with such endless options.
e.g. https://hackaday.io/project/194683-plasma-toroid-sky-guided-...
Naturally it does mean you can't have a ground pour, so the PCB needs to be designed to look nice with it.
Even more reason to "Melt your circuit boards"
video: https://youtu.be/euJgtLcWWyo
blog: https://mitxela.com/projects/melting_kicad
The retro(-style) Casio community lives for retro-future kitsch. I guess it's a matter of taste.
Casio's a dedicated watch company. Even in their earliest iterations, they were less limited. From the site [1], this appears to be one person's project.
> Going with light grey plastic was a mistake, makes it look like a cheap prop of a metallic object.
I wonder if it's less the colour than the sheen of that specific type of plastic. Casio has some great looking fake-metal. In the end, cheap plastic will probably end up looking like what it is.
1. https://dotslashwatch.com/hardware/
Watches are an aesthetic accessory as much as functional devices, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s ok for different people to have different views on it.
Was this sentence designed to make you look more mature and developed than this imagined 13 year old? It fails to do so.
I did that, and got a banging career out of it. Would recommend!
God, HN has become a bunch of sourpusses.
I agree with what you said though, when I was 13(-ish) I had an XKCD store t-shirt with a bunch of Linux commands upside-down so you could reference them [1]. I loved the idea but didn't love the shirt (not a fan of black t-shirts), so I didn't wear it much. I would've definitely wore this watch though, I'd even wear it today except I recently got a chunky watch that fits my proportions better than the retro-Casio-style.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220125185031/https://store.xkc...
Really? It looks like it would be uncomfortable to wear with those screws on the back sitting proud of the surface. Why aren't they countersunk?
Or were you referring only to the electronics?
seems useful on it. can you run
watch -n '.\t'
on it? /jk as that would make it a dedicated watch watch
__________________
0. https://dotslashwatch.com/images/Run_Example.webp
wow, we're really lost the plot haven't we :(
I’ve been wanting a larger watch than most companies make. I’d like a traditional digital watch. Since I can’t find what I want, I’ve been thinking about building my own. I want to go to about 60mm for the case (across my wrist).
I purchased a Casio G-Shock GA-010 last week but its size is smaller than I anticipated. It’s 52mm.
I’ve also been drafting a document about how I’m using a digital watch to increase my productivity while limiting distractions.
Very cool
Edit: huh, someone has apparently done it! https://www.reddit.com/r/termux/comments/nl0rex/termux_on_we...
I do want to dig into how much a battery can be obviated here, there's one watch called the Pulse-o-matic that uses an automatic movement (that is, self-winding) to power an LCD display and associate 'tronics. I am charmed by the idea of wind up electronics now that we have microchips with deep sleep modes and ePaper displays that only need a blip to update.
https://theprintablewatch.com/collections/digital-watch-part...
https://www.hamiltonwatch.com/en-us/h52585339-pulsomatic.htm...
What I particularly liked was that these clocks did not actually tell you the time unless you hooked them up to your notebook's RS232 port and telneted in. We don't even have serial ports now, particularly on laptops, but I had to telnet into them to update them when the clocks changed to/from GMT/BST.
Up the road from these expensive clocks was a college that had a horology course. People on it would spend their three years making these absurd timepieces that were all about the mechanism and it was almost a point of pride for the students to have just an hour hand rather than something actually useful.
I feel that this watch concept needs a few more iterations to make it stylishly useless. For example, if the strap was like one of those ribbon cables we used to use to connect disk drives to the motherboard in early PCs, with an adaptor so the ribbon cable is either a watch strap, plugged into the watch, or a connector to a break out box that connects to a PC via USB, with this being the sole means of adjusting the watch or setting what mode it is in.
Regarding the screen and the terminal styling, this doesn't quite work for me as 'time' is what I type into the terminal to time something and 'date' is what I type in to get the date. I therefore see the terminal styling as a bit over the top. What I would like to see is an OG font from the 8 bit days, with blinking cursor, in old school LCD, think of the one character high screens that the last of the typewriters had.
Regarding changing the mode, some dip switches could come in handy. I think that there is fun to be had and that everyone would want to critique whatever gets made, as, ultimately, a CASIO is far better for the task in hand, plus you can also get calculator watches by them that get 90% of the aesthetic for a bargain price. But that is not the point though, much like the horology students, it is all about creating a timepiece and the challenges that involves, notably keeping the time accurate.
A for effort, and A for posting your work for armchair experts like me to critique!
> I had never done any PCB design before and downloaded KiCAD with no idea how it worked.
I saw similar lines among many people who designed great things, take a note, companies, just because an engineer doesn’t have 10y of experience in XYZ doesn’t mean they won’t do great in the job.
why
imho a watch is useless if you cant just look at it and see the time.