Two dead-simple watch buttons (compass + record) — worth building a <$200 prototype in Shenzhen?
I don’t want another app-heavy smartwatch. I want two physical keys that always do the same thing: one starts a voice memo, one opens the compass. Glove-friendly, no digging through menus. Visible recording indicator, user-triggered — same class of feature as phone voice memos / existing watch notes, not a hidden recorder.
I looked around. Outdoor watches already have a compass. Some Huawei / Apple / Garmin models can record. A few let you remap a button. What I can’t find is that dead-key interaction as the point of the product: two keys, those two jobs, no hunting.
I asked an AI to sanity-check it. Short version of what it said:
- There isn’t a ready-made watch that matches this interaction.
- Compass is almost never on the SoC; you add a magnetometer. Recording needs a mic + firmware. The buttons are just GPIOs.
- Don’t start from loose chips. Buy an already-assembled open-source watch PCB (or its larger development board), 3D-print a case, put two keys over GPIO pads, bind them in firmware to compass / record.
That path is in the ballpark of under $200 for a first sample if I don’t invent a new board.
Then I found that the board is fulfilled from Shenzhen. I live in Shenzhen. Pickup is realistic; local parts (battery, printed case, extra buttons) are cheap. I actually sat up when I realized I wouldn’t be waiting on international shipping.
So the question isn’t “is this a Kickstarter.” I already got talked out of crowdfunding a generic smartwatch. The question is:
Is this worth a weekend of acting on — walk over, grab the board, print a case, map two buttons — or am I about to spend ~$200 proving something I already know?
What I think I might learn: whether a dedicated rec key + compass key feels as good as it does in my head, and whether the magnetometer/mic on a hobby board are good enough to even demo.
What I’m afraid of: ending up with a development-board-in-a-shell that doesn’t wear like a watch, and calling that “the idea is done.”
If you’ve built a wearable from an open PCB + printed case: was the first unit actually informative, or did you need a second, smaller board before you learned anything? Would you spend the $200?