How to make the Watchy vibrate


Watch with a big USB cable plugged in.

I am enjoying playing with the eInk Watchy. It is a cute package and is everything I want in a Smart-Watch; geeky, long battery life, and not obnoxious. But - fuck me! - the documentation is atrocious! Well, that's a lie. There is no documentation. It has the "Chat to us on Discord" anti-pattern that infects so many otherwise great projects. So I'm left to figure out how to make the Watchy's haptics work. The example watchfaces have a file called settings.h which contains .vibrateOClock =…

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An eInk, Wrist-Mounted, TOTP Generator


A chunky wristwatch showing the time and a selection of 6 digit codes and their corresponding entities.

Behold! Thanks to the power of the Watchy development platform, I now have all my 2FA codes available at the flick of my wrist! HOWTO This uses Luca Dentella's TOTP-Arduino library. You will need a pre-shared secret which is then converted into a Hex array. Use the OTP Tool for Arduino TOTP Library to get the Hex array, Base32 Encoded Key, and a QR Code to scan into your normal TOTP generator. Add the Hex array into the code below. To check that it is functioning correctly, either scan…

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Stupidly Small eInk Font


A chunky eInk watch with a ridiculously small font.

I have the new Watchy eInk watch. It has a cute little screen with a resolution of 200x200 pixels. How much text can we cram in there? A typical watch face looks like this: My new watch face is far superior and looks like this: That's using the GNU Unifont - which works brilliantly on tiny devices. HOWTO Download the GNU Unifont Download and compile HarfBuzz Run the HarfBuzz Font Subsetter ./hb-subset unifont-15.0.06.ttf…

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3D Printed, Arduino Powered, Educational, Open Source, Micro-Robots!


Last week I was invited to attend a product launch by BQ. They're a small company based out of Spain who create some curiously innovative products - including smartphones which natively run Cyanogen. I'm particularly looking forward to reviewing their Ubuntu Tablet later in the year. The thing which really caught my eye was Zowi (pronounced Zoë). It looks like this: And it dances like this: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/zowi.mp4 Ok, but what is it? Here's what you …

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