Maker and and YouTuber Seon Rozenblum aka Unexpected Maker has just launched his new open-source smartwatch kit called the Tinywatch S3. We have seen many such smartwatch projects in the past and we have even made our own esp32 based smartwatch a year back. The watch kit comes with some impressive specs, it is powered by an ESP32-S3 Pico SoC featuring two 32-bit Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz with 8MB of flash storage,512kB of SRAM and 2MB of PSRAM. For display, the TinyWatch S3 uses a 1.69” ST7789 capacitive touch display with a resolution of 240x320 pixels. Additionally, the TinyWatch S3 comes with various sensors and peripherals such as an ICS-43434 I2S MEMS Microphone, magnetic buzzer, haptic feedback, BMI270 6 Axis IMU and a MMC5603 Magnetometer.
For battery charging the TinyWatch S3 utilises a TP4065 with a maximum charge current of 600mA and for battery monitoring MAX1704X fuel gauge IC. For accurate timekeeping, it uses an RV-3028-C7 low-power, high-accuracy RTC chip. In addition to the touch screen, the Tiny Watch S3 also have three tactile buttons which include an on/off button, a reset button and an IO0/boot button. These will come in handy when developing and flashing the watch firmware.
Now if we look at the firmware side the TinyWatch S3 comes with an easy-to-use framework. The firmware is being developed in the PlatformIO with the ESP32 Arduino Core framework. The firmware is currently in the early development stage and only supports the bare minimum of basic functionalities including digital and analog watch faces along with some sample apps. The current alpha version of the firmware comes with hardcoded applications such as an audio visualization app, a compass, and a sample “Hello World” app. The TinyWatch S3 also features a web interface for configuration, in which we can configure the entire watch over the air using any web browser. the developer also offers a web flash tool for flashing or upgrading the official firmware. While you can get the TinyWatch S3 as a kit from the maker, all the source files including hardware design files and firmware course code can be found in the TinyWatch GitHub repository in case you want to make your own with some modifications.
