Chronos EZ430: An SDK packing watch for real techies When does The Register take interest in a $50 sports watch? When it comes with an SDK and wireless connectivity, and packing a screwdriver. The Chronos EZ430 from Texas Instruments is no consumer product, despite its appearance and low price. It's really a development platform designed to show off what TI's embedded sensor …
... but if you really want to look a twat in all social situations while saving a bit of cash the "Girl Tech IM-me" uses the same TI radio chippery and can be had for a tenner on the high street. There's also a burgeoning hacking community for it, but you sacrifice the accelerometer for a qwerty keyboard and a bigger screen. Oh, and it's bright pink.
I still have a Timex Datalink watch. Yup, It's still running fine even though I bought it about 20 years ago.
Inside it runs on a Motorola HC6805 micro, and downloading to it is done using a PC with CRT monitor, flashing lines on the screen to get 1200 baud through the photodiode in the watch face. Apart from telephone numbers, to-do list and appointments from MS schedule / Outlook no less, you can also install 1 user app (stopwatch, etc.)
There was a community that worked out how to write different apps for the phone in assember and all sorts of apps were available, including one that told you how long you were allowed in each pub to do a pub crawl of 1 pub per station on the London circle line before closing time!
No link!?! Thank the gods and little fishes I can form a simple query to enter into a search engine. I shall benevolently spare every future interested party the arduous process of typing something like 'ti watch' or 'chronos ez430' into "The Goog" or some such.
http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/ez430-chronos.html
Now then, I'll be off to place an order.
I notice this bears more than a passing resemblance to my Polar FT80 ("training computer" aka heart rate monitor connected watch)... with the addition of built in RF (rather than the NFC that Polar use with a dongle) and accelerometers (for pedometer? inertial mapping?) this could make an interestign next generation device
The 3 models listed at uk.farnell.com have these designations:
EZ430-CHRONOS-868: "EU"
EZ430-CHRONOS-915: "US"
EZ430-CHRONOS-433: "WW"
Assuming WW == WorldWide, it does beg the question of which bit of spectrum is unregulated in the UK: 868MHz or 433MHz. Or both. Google has yet to produce a definitive answer ...
433MHz is indeed legal world-wide, but that model wasn't available when this article was written. We used the EU-legal 868MHz model, which the piece wrongly said was usable in the US (that's been fixed now).
So if you can get 433MHz then best go for that, and do let me know what you end up using it for as we'll be continuing to see what it can do over the next month or two.
Bill.
So a wireless programable device capable of reading rapid wrist movments and transmiting them to a computer? Which via the internet could talk to other computers that are themselve's talking to other wrist mounted motion sensors? 15 comments in and I'm the first to think of the teledildontic possiblities of this peice of kit? My fellow commentards, you're slipping...
Got to be Paris, everyone gather round, open channel "C"...
Cheers, Steve.
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