Tag Archives: Modular Smartwatch

What if you could build your own smartwatch?

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You know I’m going to come at you with the modular Phonebloks argument, but think about it… There’s so much in your phone you don’t use, or rather, so much you want from your phone but there’s just not enough demand. I for one would love for my phone to be able to pack great audio recording and playback capabilities, but phones are too camera-centric. As far as wearables go, it’s even more pressing that I have a wearable that does exactly what I need to. Some people need health tracking, others want their wearable to be an extension of their phone, there are also people who believe smartwatches should have an incredible battery life, like analog watches. The only way to make everyone happy? Modularity.

Blocks does a rather unique thing in which it recognizes that the watch strap is useful real-estate. It breaks the strap down into modules, allowing you to plug modules in that you need, letting you build the smartwatch of your dreams. The face of the watch forms what they call the “Core”, having all the essential features like Bluetooth and wifi connectivity as well as a touch-sensitive display, activity tracking, and a 1.5-day battery life. The modules that attach to it (forming the bad) are what make the Blocks interesting. You’ve got modules for everything you could possibly think of, from the usual Heart Rate Monitor, GPS, and an extra battery unit, to the unusual Camera, Fingerprint Reader, and NFC Payment module, to the absolutely bizarre ECG/Stress Level, Flashlight, and Bone Conduction Speaker Module. Based on your needs, you can pack up to 5 sensors into a single watch and they work using a proprietary plug-and-play connection that is beautifully flexible as any watch strap is, but gives the smartwatch powers that you’ve bestowed on it… making it an incredibly functional device, but also an incredibly functional device that’s unique to you and your needs. Rather fascinating I’d say…

Designer: Blocks

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BLOCKS Modular Smartwatch Hits Kickstarter

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Blocks Modular Smarwatch Kickstarter 01

After two years into development and a promise that it would be launched this year, the Blocks modular smartwatches finally gets a chance to become a reality.

BLOCKS Wearables, the UK-based company behind this modular smartwatch, announced back in March 2014 that it would launch their product this year. This April, when most people had forgotten about that, Pebble showcased its Smartstraps and thus hinted at its plans of making a modular smartwatch. Since that hasn’t happened, yet, we’re going going back to BLOCKS Wearables, who launched today their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for the world’s first modular smartwatch.

“The development of the Core has been done. Initial designs for Modules are done, components are selected. The Modules are made at prototype stage but the electronics for the Modules for the final product needs to be produced and tested,” explained BLOCKS co-founder Ali Tahmaseb, pointing out that the modular smartwatch is currently in the engineering prototype phase, with a final design ready for testing scheduled for December.

“On the software side, the Android optimizations are mainly done. We have partnered up with a software company with very talented engineers previously in the Google Android team, that are working on even more optimizations and interactions. We have done an initial version of our launcher and menus but are still working on the User Interface.”

The Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign reached its funding goal of $250,000 within a few hours since the project’s launch, so there’s no doubt that BLOCKS will be mass produced. Anyone who has pledged $285 or more (the pledge for early birds was smaller, but those spots are long gone) will receive their modular smartwatch in May 2016. The Core, to which you can later add modules, can be had for $195. Given that the developers have already hit the goal, all that they have to do in the remaining days until the campaign’s end is to add stretch goals. Considering how many modules can be created for a smartwatch, they shouldn’t have problems getting ideas for that.

The first Kickstarter funding phase focuses on five initial modules for additional battery capacity, GPS navitation, heart rate monitor, NFC sensor, and an “adventure module” that transmits to the smartwatch such info as the current altitude, pressure and temperature, details of utter importance for hikers. I’m sure that there will be plenty others coming soon after, making this the only smartwatch you will ever need, as its developers claim, too.

Tahmaseb is quite confident that the company will be able to deliver the modular smartwatches in May 2016: “We have selected components and designs that are reliable, previously tested in other devices, and easy to manufacture. Our ODM has extensive experience in bringing very high quality consumer electronics to market. Our main innovation is in the industrial design, connectors, and communications which have been done by our team. Therefore, it is a good estimate.”

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via TechCrunch

Pebble Smartstraps Paint the Future of Wearable Tech

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Pebble Time Smartstraps 2

Modular wearables aren’t for everyone, so Pebble has decided to offer its smartwatches in two strikingly different flavors: with and without smartstraps.

The manufacturer of some of the best smartwatches on Earth (or at least that’s what I think, along with the 78,471 backers that pledged money for Pebble’s latest crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter) has recently announced that it would launch smartstraps for Pebble Time, in an attempt to satisfy as many needs as possible.

Modular wearables don’t represent an entirely new concept (as Phoneblocks has toyed with this idea, too, last year, and announced that it would launch the BLOCKS modular smartwatch in 2015), but we have yet to see a mainstream solution. The fact that these smartstraps are coming from Pebble and not from a newcomer should boost the overall confidence of the potential customers. As if Pebble didn’t already have plenty of backers!

“It’s only been a few short weeks since we announced smartstraps, but we’re pretty pumped with how it’s going,” explained Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky in an e-mail to Brian P. Rubin of ReadWrite. “Pebble is working on a few projects internally, but we haven’t made any of them public yet.”

Migicovsky also hinted at some of the possibilities: “Imagine GPS, so you could track your runs and rides without taking your phone along, or a battery strap, increasing Pebble Time’s battery from seven days to…maybe a month? Then there is always the opportunity for hackers and makers to create straps that bring a special, unique sensor or functionality for a particular use case, like a certain health situation.”

Xadow, Seeed’s modular hardware platform, will soon be compatible with Pebble’s smartstrap port, and considering that the platform includes such modules as barometric sensors, NFC chips, and accelerometers, among many others, there’s a lot to be excited about. Spark, a San Francisco Internet-of-Things startup, demonstrated their skills by creating a cellular connectivity smartstrap in an afternoon.

“When Pebble was announcing Time, they talked about their smartstraps, and we were building the Electron at the same time,” stated Zach Supalla, Sparks’ CEO, in an interview with ReadWrite. “We thought, oh, this would be a really cool use case. Let’s hack together a prototype and show how a Pebble could theoretically be not tethered to a phone and connect directly to a cellular network. [...] Really for us, it’s about inspiring people to think about creating products like that themselves. We’d love to see somebody take the Electron, which is our development kit, and use it to create something like that as a commercial product.”

In conclusion, Pebble seems to agree with the “different strokes for different folks” expression, and realizes that the perfect smartwatch is the one you build yourself, with only the modules you need and nothing more. In the future, modularity will (or should) be applied to smartwatches and smartphones, but I’d like to see more devices, and especially wearables, following this trend. After all, some functions available in the smartwatches we can buy now are utterly useless to some, while others think that they could use some more functions besides the basic ones.

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BLOCKS Modular Smartwatch to Be Released in 2015

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Blocks Modular Smartwatch

Modularity could make as much sense in smartwatches as it does in Google’s Project Ara smartphone, as it would enable people to use only the bits they’re really interested in.

The idea behind the Blocks modular smartwatch is pretty simple: you should be allowed to buy only the modules that you find useful, without paying extra money for the bells and whistles smartwatch manufacturers typically throw in the bundle.

It definitely looks like the world is going back to barebones that can be customized according to the taste and needs of each of us. That’s simply great, as we can create unique combinations of modules that are particular to every individual, and secondly, we no longer have to break the bank when buying a smartwatch or any piece of wearable tech, for that matter.

Needs change in time, and not only because new devices (or in this case new modules) hit the market, but also because humans feel the need to evolve (at least some of us do). Whenever this happens, the owners of a Blocks modular smartwatch would be able to swap their older modules for the newer and better ones, in order to be harder, better, faster, stronger, of course!

In the case of modular smartphones, the modules are found on the back of the device. Taking such an approach would be impossible in the case of smartwatches, so the Blocks timepiece will feature modules in the form of wristband links. This would practically enable people to attach all sorts of sensors (GPS, heartbeat sensors, accelerometers, etc.), cameras, microphones, audio jacks, speakers, and anything else you could think of. If you can’t afford or simply don’t need more than a few modules, you can complete the wristband using dummy blocks. Anyway, this concept could easily open the way for a world of customizations.

The launch date of the Blocks smartwatch is currently unknown, and is only estimated to be sometime in 2015. The price is yet another aspect that hasn’t been disclosed, but the basic package, which includes the display, the CPU and the battery, shouldn’t be more expensive than the $150 Pebble. Rumor has it that Google is going to sell the basic package of Project Ara for $50, so a barebone smartwatch costing three times as much is a bit unrealistic, I would say.

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