At this point, the Casio smartwatch is not new. The company officially join the smartwatch game last year with its first Wear OS-powered device. Though that was hardly the first. The watchmaker first ventured into the smart timepiece territory in 2016. But clearly, there are folks like me who love to see a “restomod” version.
By “restomod”, we meant by taking a classic F-91W square watch, ripping its internals, and replacing it with smartwatch functionality. That said, there is this one maker known as “Pegor” who is doing that.
Pegor has been working on turning an F-91W into a smartwatch but this endeavor has kind of burned Pegor out. So now, Pegor is seeking like-minded folks with the necessary knowledge to help him to his take the project, dubbed F91 Kepler, over the finish line.
Pegor has released a work-in-progress “reboot” of the Casio F91W digital watch as a modern smartwatch. The beauty of Pegor’s F91 Kepler is that it retains only the original case and replaces everything on the inside, including adding an OLED display, to achieve smartwatch functionality.
The internal is built around a Texas Instruments CC2640 ARM Cortex-M3 chip with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This allows pairing with smartphones to allow for call and message notifications which are displayed on a bar at the top of the display.
Much work is still needed, though. Like making all the buttons functional and developing a companion app. We may be oversimplifying it but it really is not as simple.
If you are interested to learn more, we suggest you dig into the article on hackster.io and maybe also hit up Pegor’s Gitlab repository where you can find hardware design files, firmware, and “completely unfinished software” available under a permissive license.
Images: Pegor.
via hackster.io.
