Stunning open source OLED watch

Many sophisticated open source hardware projects are completed by electronic engineers and PCB design engineers who use Altium Designer as a development tool in their daily work. The performance of a new generation of engineers who are growing up is also very bright. Jared Sanson, a senior student at the Department of Engineering at Canterbury University in New Zealand, recently completed an amazing open source project, the open source OLED watch.

Jared germinated this idea because he had an OLED display on hand, but there was no way to drive it. Later, when he used Altium Designer to design a new PCB, he suddenly realized that he could not waste this display. So he decided to transform the OLED display into a smart watch platform and install low-power Bluetooth and various sensors.

In embarking on this project, Jared decided to use the PIC24F microcontroller because it has enough processing power to drive the OLED display. He hopes that the size of the PCB can be perfectly adapted to the size of the OLED display. Such an idea poses a great challenge to the design. Since the types of components that can be selected are strictly limited, he had no choice but to use passive components in the 0603 package. At the same time, due to the lack of equipment to solder BGA packaged devices, Jared chose to easily solder QFN packaged chips. In order to reduce costs, Jared must limit the board's structure to less than two layers, which makes wiring on the PCB very difficult. The last few wires on the PCB took almost as long as Jared spent wiring on other wires.

During the project, because Jared's school network could not access the Altium Content Vault, Jared couldn't easily obtain the applicable components. Therefore, he decided to do most of the components himself first, and then proceed to PCB design. When receiving the first version of the PCB, Jared discovered that the microcontroller's package size was too small and had to be redesigned due to forgetting to check the package of the chip being used.

Despite all sorts of challenges, Jared thinks that Altium Designer has brought him a lot of convenience during the project. He believes that the 3D PCB view of Altium Designer is very useful, and can help designers to clearly see the impact of each component on the overall thickness and how the battery under the PCB will be installed when placing components on the PCB. Jared used simple 3D bodies to create simple components such as buttons and SMD passives, and imported a STEP model for complex components such as USB sockets to accurately mount the USB socket on the PCB.

This open-source OLED watch project spent Jared for a year and now it can really show time and track his college curriculum. Jared plans to continue to modify the schematic in order to reduce power consumption, and simplify the design to make it thinner, and gradually improve the project by solving the various problems that currently exist. Jared also plans to raise funds to turn the project into an assembly that can be assembled. Due to its enthusiasm for open source hardware, Jared released project-related PCBs and firmware using open-source hardware licenses, making it easy for other engineers to use them for reference in their design projects.