Have you ever wanted to wear an Arduino on your wrist and tell the time with a giant LED matrix? Then you’ll love this three hour class at NYC Resistor that I’ll be teaching on February 9th. During the class you can learn how to solder through-hole components as we put together the Adafruit Timesquare DIY watch kit, and afterwards we will extend the watch firmware to add a new feature to the watch.
This class is a great introduction to soldering and some advanced embedded programming techniques. The coin-cell powered Timesquare watch isn’t exactly a normal Arduino and is very CPU limited, so techniques for limiting power consumption, waking up from deep sleep with interrupt handlers, low voltage brownout detection and some inline AVR assembly will be discussed. If you just want to learn to solder and have a very stylish wristwatch, you don’t have to stay for the walkthrough of the firmware.
Included in the class price for every student is a pre-programmed Adafruit Timesquare watch kit and an FTDI cable for re-programming it (a $49 value). You’ll need to bring your own laptop with the Arduino IDE installed to flash new firmware onto the device if you are staying for the advanced portion of the class.
