why hello, mr. smartphone! have you metmr. dumbphone before? monochrome screen, physical keypad, the size of a brick...but unapologetically retro! a lot of you may have some of these laying around in a junk drawer somewhere collecting dust. as do i. so in my efforts to find out howto repurpose it
Android endoscope, i did what any reasonable person woulddo. i decided to turn it into a smartwatch! by the way, i'm a nerd. ok so what's theplan here? well, to meet my definition for a smart watch it has to meet a fewqualifications first. it has to:
1) tell time. 2) connect wirelessly to asmartphone. 3) notify you when you're receiving a call.and 4) notify you when you're receiving a text. other than that it's a pretty looseinterpretation, because i'm not expecting it to look pretty, and let's just assumeit'll probably be bulky. but that's not really why i'm making it. alright, now on tothe tougher question: how can i transform this into this? let's start tinkering. i have here a nokia1100 and the good thing about these older phones is that they're easier totake apart and scavenge parts from. so
removing the battery and prying itopen, you can see all the different internal components. and the firstscavenge-able one is obvious: the lcd screen. you can't really tell, but it evenhas its own backlight. this little protective plastic cover also might comein handy. digging around, the only other useful components i could find were avibrating motor and a small speaker. don't know if these will be used yet, butthey may come in handy. basically what's going to make or breakthis project as if i can get this lcd screen working. i decided to use anarduino to drive it because arduino uno is large enough for prototyping anarduino mini is the perfect size for a
smartwatch. digging up and schematiconline, i found that this specific lcd is a pcf8814. so be sure that you know what type ofscreen you have before continuing. for mine, i was able to find out what each ofthese pins represent. and if you have a different screen, your pins will probably be different. to connect it to anarduino i had to make each of these pins longer, so i soldered a ribbon cable toeach one. all right, to make the size smaller ithen use some sharp shears to cut off the excess plastic around the lcd.
no going back now. now i can connect itto the breadboard, but before jumping it off to the arduino, i added someresistors to avoid burning it out. you can connect it to the arduino likeyou see here. this would be a good time to point out that, if you needmore details or help, you can visit the project page at this link. ok, now let's write some code to testthis thing out. in order to use the lcd with arduino, we're going to need toinstall a code library to make it easier to connect to. there are a couple of libraries outthere for the pcf8814,
but i went with this one because itallows you to display bitmap images. i just downloaded and unzipped it to my arduino library folder and wrote some simple code that imported the library,set the lcd specific variables, and then used the library to write some initialtext, and then looped through a few more lines of text as a shameless plug. all right, now i'm going to connect thearduino and upload the code. this is the make-or-break moment. and wehave success! i am now one step closer to making my own smartwatch! next time,the plan is to add a motor, a bluetooth connection, phone notifications, and tryto cram it all into a case. if you
want to see more my smartwatch series,i've created a playlist so that you can stay updated whenever they becomeavailable. what ideas would you like to see next?submit or vote for your favorites at www.tinkenut.com/ideas click here to watch more videos likethis, and if you'd like to support my
show, please feel free to like, subscribe,comment, or donate at www.tinkernut.com/donate all right that's it for thistutorial, for more go to www.tinkernut.com!
