14 DAY TRIAL // It's still pretty hard to create complex items via 3D printing technology, but if there are people bold enough to say they can make a multi-material, 4-color 3D printer that can even craft circuits in-process, it's not hard to imagine that someone has already 3D printed a smartwatch.
Not that the miraculous 3D printer we wrote about yesterday was used here. After all, that particular contraption is still raising funds for now.
However, there are other ways for projects to be tackled, and in this care, we're looking at the results of a competition.
We're talking about Make Magazine’s Arduino Challenge, which was won by one Jonathan Cook for his success in creating a 3D printed watch.
Well, a partially 3D printed watch anyway, since only the case seems to have been designed using such a method.
A microduino chip installed on a board outfitted with various buttons, transistors and wires lie inside that case, and it took nine months of testing and research to make the whole thing.
The inventor appears to have been feeling somewhat nostalgic as well, because he gave the watch an old-school look.
Kind of understandable, because while the watch does have what it takes to be a “smart” watch, it isn't, as of yet.
Cook will keep working on it though, and he has also opened his invention to anyone else brave enough to try their hand at something similar.
Which is to say, there are instructions published at Cook’s Open Source Watch Site. They show exactly how to make a similar device, though it won't be easy.
Soon enough, we may even see the PCB being 3D printed, since the way circuits are scribed on boards today isn't that different from inkjet printing. The leap shouldn't be too hard.
Cook wants his project to be the pebble that starts an avalanche, more or less. His next order of business will be to integrate Twitter updates, Facebook notifications and other social networking apps in the watch. Other connected pieces of software ought to follow.
At the end of the day, we may actually have an unassuming device that can link up to any smartphone, instead of being limited to brand-isolated inventions like the (admittedly much better-looking, refined) Apple iWatch and Samsung Gear series.
“I see this first as an open source ‘pebble’ type project,” Cook reportedly said, according to 3DPI. He's got ambition, if nothing else.