Y’all, that was fast! In just 23 hours, 236 backers pledged $10,010 to bring Sensor Watch into this world — and those numbers keep climbing. Over 300 of you have ordered a watch, and some of you have ordered two! I’m blown away by the interest in this humble project, and so grateful to everyone who pledged their support to make Sensor Watch real. To be honest, I imagined this first update would be a longer deep dive into some of features of the watch, but we’ll move that to next week. For now, just a quick update about where we are and what comes next.

First up: the goal of this campaign has always been to create a community around the Sensor Watch hardware; to that end, check out the Sensor Watch discussion board on GitHub, where folks are already asking questions and talking about things that they want to do with Sensor Watch. You can also reach out directly to me at the Ask a Technical Question link on the campaign page — I’ve already answered a few questions there!

Second: if you’d like to see a demonstration of the latest features of the watch, I’ll be joining Adafruit’s weekly Show and Tell this evening at 7:30 PM EST. (That’s soon!) I plan to share some of the excitement about the campaign, as well as a demonstration of some of the newest watch faces like the Battery Monitor, World Time, and the TOTP watch face (by backer Wesley Ellis)!

Movement: The Community Firmware

Next: work continues on Movement, the community Sensor Watch firmware. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you can take a look at the README here, and view the full source code of several watch faces in the watch_faces directory. The main campaign page describes a vision of folks building their own software for Sensor Watch. This is how I imagine folks will do it.

Movement is an application that manages a list of watch faces that the wearer can step through using the Mode button on Sensor Watch. Watch faces can be fairly static informational displays like the Simple Clock or Beat Time face, or they can be highly interactive like the Temperature Log watch face. Movement also includes its own watch faces for setting the time and changing user preferences. This means your watch face can focus on the things that make it unique, instead of boilerplate tasks related to setting up a wristwatch.

Moving Forward: 40 days remain!

The success of the last 48 hours has been amazing, but just as amazing is the fact that this is just the beginning! There’s plenty of time to spread the word about Sensor Watch and grow our community.

We also have weekly updates planned for throughout the campaign: next week we’ll dive deep into timekeeping and sensing features, and describe a use case for taking Sensor Watch out on the trail. Later on we’ll talk about Movement’s low power features, build a watch face from scratch, and do a deep dive into understanding every component on the Sensor Watch circuit board.

So thank you again for your support, and stay tuned for more about Sensor Watch!