Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch

_def

Yay, I wanted to do the same - glad someone did work on it and shared it! Thanks! Although I think what I've learned is that I actually don't like wrist bands, so... yeah.

NoboruWataya

> Although I’ve been saying “Claude”, I actually did most of the work in OpenCode with some of my favorite open weights models. Kimi K3 & K2.6, and DeepSeek v4 Pro & Flash. ... This seems needlessly confusing/misleading? Author continues to use "Claude" throughout the article.

dallen33

Not the point of the article but it did show a Bluesky post... I didn't know you could make the Apple Watch interface look different with a third-party app. I gotta try this out.

bravura

The PineTime watch unfortunately does not have any microphone, so there is no possibility of voice control.

knodi

if you used the word "Hacking" anywhere in your project i'm suprised Fable didn't downgrade you.

system2

If it is open source, is it still considered hacking?

mlhpdx

Take the fun up a level with the Waveshare ESP32-S3 AMOLED 2.09” watch. Power management is absolutely required, but it’s a fun platform. And for about the same price good display, peripherals and CPU. I’d like to see one with the C6 variant for the low power core.

yjftsjthsd-h

> The watch can’t hold this whole image in memory at once; it has to stream it from the file system. I really do wish the pinetime had more RAM; it's really really small and a pretty painful bottleneck. Edit: Oh, once the "pro" version is out I guess there's an easy answer to that: https://pine64.org/2026/03/28/pinetime_march_2026/

wxw

> Although I’ve been saying “Claude”, I actually did most of the work in OpenCode with some of my favorite open weights models. Kimi K3 & K2.6, and DeepSeek v4 Pro & Flash. Interesting, is Claude becoming the Kleenex of the agent world?

realo

I launched Claude on my pebble watch face software some time ago. It was also great fun to see it rejuvenate a 10-year old obsolete code base and make it work very well on the latest pebble Time 2 watches now available (finally!) today. https://apps.repebble.com/bitcoin-and-weather_38d93227474b40... https://github.com/yodalf/coincan

ck2

really hoping someday soon "AI" enables the ability to have an open-source $100 Garmin clone Coros and Amazfit especially got close but they are closed development even though they push features and bug-fixes daily to compete in the market there has a to be a single or maybe 2,3 chip solution for known desired features, dual-band GPS, AMOLED screen, full five physical buttons, ANT+BLE+WIFI radios, and enough RAM+storage to not worry about hyper-efficiency anymore

kixiQu

It's interesting to think how nearly-e-waste level hardware could combine with something [home-cooked]( https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ ) to be really cool, especially for folks who might have been intimidated by this kind of development before.

mapontosevenths

I did something like this with a lilygo t-watch and Codex. It was a lot of fun. I call it 'kookwatch', because I modeled it after some nonsense from Dirk Gently's Detective agency and frankly it's about as Kooky as things get. It uses the built-in hardware RNG to generate random numbers in the background and then trigger I-ching casts randomly when there are clumps in the Poisson distribution. I vaguely recall something about "random sampling of the universe" and a "suffusion of yellow" from when I read the book years ago, so i called the events "suffusions". I scaled it so that it goes off randomly about once per day. I added some backgrounds and animations, and some random funny quotes as well, and has no real point other than to make me smile. It's generally the weirdest thing I ever built, but I have so much fun with it and it was fun to build.

ashu1461

I just did a side project to show how many calories I consumed on my garmin watch https://ashu1461.com/posts/a-calorie-tracker-on-my-garmin-wa... Claude really helped in doing the heavy lifting.

yreg

Any other recommendations for fun and cheap devices with open firmware? (Or easily customized with LLMs in other ways?)

a2ff6eeb0

> I think Fable would have probably been able to finish the work and get it pixel-perfect without supervision, if I gave it a feedback loop to screenshot the simulator. Yeah, I think it's entirely possible for the AI to get to full autonomous development these days. It's impressive seeing how we no longer need any skill, we just desire something and the result gets spit out, no human investment needed beyond the initial request. I wonder how hard it would be to connect the AI directly to the end user, and full remove human toil from everything but the final manual testing. I don't see that last step going away, since the AI doesn't know what the human desire was to verify that it got that part right

TravisBarton

I've been hacking with a FB Portal and its been a lot of fun to build out a personal home assistant with some unorthedox interfaces!

xp84

One of my favorite cheap tech finds is a no-name, small OLED smartwatch that cost under $20. It has all the basic fitness features, an app that is surprisingly nicely done, and it exposes all its data to Apple Health. It supports the limited notifications API that Apple exposes, so it buzzes for calls and can show you text messages you got. Does music control, raise to wake. And somehow with all of this, it has a battery life of about 10-15 days on a charge. Unbelievable that the Apple Watch adds really only two important features I care about (making your iPhone beep, and Apple Pay) but only lasts a single day on a charge, and costs nearly 10x what this one does. Anyway, it also comes with about 100 choices of faces. I only wish it was open source or at least an "open" platform so that I could make my own.

aizk

Decompiling things with llms is a blast, until they refuse. Thankfully open source is catching up.