I bought a watch

So this is going to be one of those not-so-technical posts.
I bought a watch this week at Sears.

I love this picture.

The gold watch on the far left is the one I've been wearing for a while. I practically built the thing.

I bought a fake Casio A159W watch, then bought a Casio F-91W and replaced the fake A159W with the innards from the F-91W.

So that way I have a gold watch that won't break if I submerse it in water or drop it on the ground.

I bought the oyster watch band to fit onto the watch. It's a pretty much a unique watch because I custom built it.

The silver watch on the top is a classic Casio A168W. Nothing too special about it.

The watch that I bought this week is the two tone analog watch to the left. That's what I bought for 60% off of $35, so I bought it for $15.

Chain shows up in everything.

I didn't realize this when I bought it, but the Decade brand watch looks extremely similar to...

a Rolex Datejust

http://www.rolex.com/watches/datejust/m116233-0149.html

a $12,000 watch. I was thrilled to realize this because I love buying knockoffs. It's flashy in a sort of ironic way.

Here are some main similarities:

• Fluted bezel (that gold ring around the whole watchface)
• twotone 
• Jubilee bracelet
• Gold crown (that thing to adjust the time)

Some main differences

• One is 1000x more expensive
• Decade's bracelet is not solid metal
• Decade's watch does not have date
• Decade's watch is based on quartz movement, while Rolex is mechanical
• Decade is just really cheap in all aspects. It's actually a terrible watch.

It's so cheap and that's why I love it. This Friday I didn't want to write college essays so I took some time to engrave my watch.

As seen on my Snapchat story:

I engraved my initials TSJW on the flip clip. I usually wear my watch on the inside of the wrist, and there's nothing to show off on the outside if I do this. So I felt like engraving my initials on the outside makes it feel less wrong wearing my watch on the inside.

It's so embarrassing to wear now.

So that's just some background on the watch. 

Whenever I buy something, I always end up thinking about taking it apart and modifying it (its inevitable).

A few days ago I got the watch wet and had to take it apart to dry out the moisture.
I realized how spacious the inside of the watch was... the quartz movement mechanism took up only an eight of the total space inside the watch... That gave me ideas.

The idea:

I honestly really don't like wearing analog watches. They give me a good sense of how much time is left in the day, but I spend at least five seconds reading it in order to understand what time it is actually. On a digital watch the numbers would just show up in X:XX form, but on this watch I have to spend a good amount of time decoding the placement of the hands.

Plus, the gold hands blend in with the gold face and everything is just so shiny and it makes it IMPOSSIBLE to read the time.

I love wearing digital watches, but they aren't flashy enough.

The Casio watch I have right now isn't solid metal: It's metal plated and then gold plated, which means that after wearing it for a year the gold wears off (it already has).

Literally no one sells a solid metal gold-plated digital watch at an affordable price.

So here's the idea: replace the quartz movement in the watch with a digital watch module.

Sorry, I don't have any picture of this right now (because taking apart watches is actually the worst), but imagine the Decade watch with a display like this:

Right now there are a few problems, and a few solutions that I've been thinking of.

• Fitting the innards from another digital watch into the Decade watch
• find a small enough watch, and 3D print a holder that will make it fit snuggly so it doesn't shift around.
• What do you do about the four buttons on a digital watch when you only have a hole for one crown on an analog watch case?
• I still need to figure this out.

For now I need to put off this project to concentrate on college applications, but I think this is a worthwhile project to look into. It'll probably be more difficult than my Zippo remote project, because this time I'm dealing with something a little more expensive than a lighter.

Hopefully when I come back to this idea a few months later I would have made some progress.

Cheap and easy SD WAVE player

First of all, I would like to mention that I go to school, so I'm not always posting on my blog.

Second of all, I would like to mention that this project is from elm-chan.org
I don't claim it as mine, I am simply copying the project. I wanted to mention this so that people will know that doing this: http://www.expertcore.org/viewtopic.php?t=1210

They are the exact same project, done by two different people. If you look at the code from Magneto (expertcore) the only time he mentioned elm-chan was in the main.c

/*---------------------------------------------------------------*/
/* 8-pin SD audio player R0.03                     (C)ChaN, 2010 */
/*---------------------------------------------------------------*/

The original code had all of this:

/*----------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/  8-pin SD audio player R0.05d                    (C)ChaN, 2011              /
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/ This project, program codes and circuit diagrams, is opened under license
/ policy of following trems.
/
/  Copyright (C) 2010, ChaN, all right reserved.
/
/ * This project is a free software and there is NO WARRANTY.
/ * No restriction on use. You can use, modify and redistribute it for
/   personal, non-profit or commercial use UNDER YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.
/ * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice.
/
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

I have to say Magneto did the right thing, including the copyright, however I was hoping to see (in expertcore) the original link to the project. Not only did he not mention elm-chan he copied the page word for word (with a little paraphrasing).

now that my mini-rant is over...

I want to tell you about this project. Ever since I got started in microcontrollers I thought that I would be using PIC. Well, because of the Arduino, Atmel got to me first. 

When I was looking for PIC projects then, I always wanted to make an MP3 player, or something that could hold at least 2GB of music and that I could use, you know, like an iPod shuffle.

So a week ago I found this project.

It basically uses PWM pins to simulate AC current (pretty amazing to me). Of course, with arduino you can play midi files from a PWM pin, but playing legitimate music (after converting them from MP3 to WAV) with 

• $2 attiny85
• $1 circuit board
• $0.50 parts
• $0 some old thrown out battery
• $5 SD

which is <$10, is pretty awesome.

One might expect that PWM will generate a lot of distortion. TRUE.

If you listen to this WAV player with earbuds you will be somewhat disappointed. You will hear static and the music will be too loud.

However, if you have a somewhat decent audio system, you will be amazed by the quality...

Most audio setups have low pass filters built into them and all that, so the garbage from the WAV player gets removed!

Of course you could have a built in LPF and a volume control potentiometer, but I was a bit lazy this time.

Some pictures:

Dynex converter from BestBuy ~ $5

Solder on some headers to the pins after you take it apart

Now you know why?

Soldered some pins onto the SD so that I can use it on a breadboard and other projects.

Cut grooves into PCB like a stamp. That way I can just slide in this header

Components...

Soldered together, plugged into USBTinyISP

Wire all the programming pins to where the SD socket is supposed to be (as they are connected to the chip).

Packaged nicely.

Charging is simple too!

Here's a link to elm-chan's files... I added my own folder for the PCB, schematics, and other important reference items that were not included in the original package.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-IpF4x-izXeS20wbGlwOXFYY3M&usp=sharing

Arduino? or not Arduino...

Alright, Some of you might know about Arduino, some of you might not.

All it is is a microcontroller on a board with sockets so it makes your life easier: nothing fancy.
They have a voltage regulator, a built in programmer, and all the nice peripherals in one board to make it a beautiful prototyping tool.
The IDE is easy to use too!

Well, I'm not going to explain what Arduino is on this blog. You can find that on Arduino.cc.

I'm going to talk about authenticity.

Recently I bought an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 on ebay, from China. Why?

• It costs $15
• I burnt out my Revision 2 board
• I don't really care about authenticity of an Arduino

It shouldn't really matter whether an Arduino is supplied by Arduino or not. In fact, Arduino open sources their boards, so anyone can make an exact replica of the real Arduino boards.

If its fake, it will still work; because it's an exact copy.

How do I tell if it's fake?

This is fake

This is real

Notice the different LED colors.

This is fake

"ROARD"

This is real

"BOARD"

How did THAT happen?

This is fake

This is real

Notice that the fake Arduino has shiny solder, which means it contains lead, which means it is not RoHS, which means that it is probably not authentic.

Lastly, A single component comparison:

You might notice some color differences.

It's not that important, but if you want to sue someone, here is the evidence.