Hacking with Claude on a $27 Smart Watch
mikekasberg.com59 points by speckx 5 hours ago
59 points by speckx 5 hours ago
> Although I’ve been saying “Claude”, I actually did most of the work in OpenCode with some of my favorite open weights models. Kimi K3 & K2.6, and DeepSeek v4 Pro & Flash.
Interesting, is Claude becoming the Kleenex of the agent world?
It's interesting to think how nearly-e-waste level hardware could combine with something [home-cooked](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/) to be really cool, especially for folks who might have been intimidated by this kind of development before.
old iPads are the device I wish more than any other could be recycled via running Linux etc.
I launched Claude on my pebble watch face software some time ago. It was also great fun to see it rejuvenate a 10-year old obsolete code base and make it work very well on the latest pebble Time 2 watches now available (finally!) today.
https://apps.repebble.com/bitcoin-and-weather_38d93227474b40...
Any other recommendations for fun and cheap devices with open firmware? (Or easily customized with LLMs in other ways?)
I just did a side project to show how many calories I consumed on my garmin watch
https://ashu1461.com/posts/a-calorie-tracker-on-my-garmin-wa...
Claude really helped in doing the heavy lifting.
> The watch can’t hold this whole image in memory at once; it has to stream it from the file system.
I really do wish the pinetime had more RAM; it's really really small and a pretty painful bottleneck.
Edit: Oh, once the "pro" version is out I guess there's an easy answer to that: https://pine64.org/2026/03/28/pinetime_march_2026/
The original PineTime has 64 KiB of RAM and execute in place ROM which is plenty for an embedded device
I did something like this with a lilygo t-watch and Codex. It was a lot of fun. I call it 'kookwatch', because I modeled it after some nonsense from Dirk Gently's Detective agency and frankly it's about as Kooky as things get.
It uses the built-in hardware RNG to generate random numbers in the background and then trigger I-ching casts randomly when there are clumps in the Poisson distribution. I vaguely recall something about "random sampling of the universe" and a "suffusion of yellow" from when I read the book years ago, so i called the events "suffusions". I scaled it so that it goes off randomly about once per day.
I added some backgrounds and animations, and some random funny quotes as well, and has no real point other than to make me smile. It's generally the weirdest thing I ever built, but I have so much fun with it and it was fun to build.
Yay, I wanted to do the same - glad someone did work on it and shared it! Thanks! Although I think what I've learned is that I actually don't like wrist bands, so... yeah.
fwiw I pretty much only like the metal "mesh" bands, if you haven't tried those - all other kinds make me sweat (or get uncomfortably juicy when I sweat) and/or collect crud that eventually irritates my skin if I don't wash it frequently. the mesh breathes extremely well in comparison, and essentially doesn't build up gunk at all.
also many watches are incredibly thick and I apparently routinely get my wrist within millimeters of darn near everything. a thin one (pebble time round) solved that, and being light also means it doesn't slide around or require a very tight strap.
> <..>I actually don't like wrist bands
What's stopping you from using the watch piece by itself or as another type of wearable accessory?
mine is on a wallet chain like a pocketwatch
Or pin it upside-down on your breast pocket, like a nurse.
(It's upside down so you can just lift it slightly to see the display.)
Take the fun up a level with the Waveshare ESP32-S3 AMOLED 2.09” watch.
Power management is absolutely required, but it’s a fun platform. And for about the same price good display, peripherals and CPU.
I’d like to see one with the C6 variant for the low power core.
Not the point of the article but it did show a Bluesky post... I didn't know you could make the Apple Watch interface look different with a third-party app. I gotta try this out.
The PineTime watch unfortunately does not have any microphone, so there is no possibility of voice control.
> Although I’ve been saying “Claude”, I actually did most of the work in OpenCode with some of my favorite open weights models. Kimi K3 & K2.6, and DeepSeek v4 Pro & Flash.
... This seems needlessly confusing/misleading? Author continues to use "Claude" throughout the article.
Maybe "Claude" is the new "Xerox", but for coding agents instead of copiers?
Like older people saying "ChatGPT" for everything AI
Not just older people, though they may be more likely to make the “Googling with ChatGPT” joke.
Or the refs in some american game using "iPads" while visibly holding some MS tablets that they probably paid handsomely to be used and displayed...
really hoping someday soon "AI" enables the ability to have an open-source $100 Garmin clone
Coros and Amazfit especially got close but they are closed development even though they push features and bug-fixes daily to compete in the market
there has a to be a single or maybe 2,3 chip solution for known desired features, dual-band GPS, AMOLED screen, full five physical buttons, ANT+BLE+WIFI radios, and enough RAM+storage to not worry about hyper-efficiency anymore
I'm not convinced I know exactly what features or usecase you're trying to hit, but I will point out that if it ever ships the pinetime pro is supposed to have GPS, higher specs, and is of course going to be very open to customization and running whatever software you feel like.
If it is open source, is it still considered hacking?
Hacking is widely considered to historically mean "using a system in a creative and unusual way to get it to behave in ways that were not anticipated or intended by the creator". A hacker is a tinkerer. Some tinkerers do crime. Most don't.
Asking this on a site called Hacker News is gold.
Heh, true, but when I think about open source, I think of "developing". Hacking indicates a restricted device being unlocked or doing things that it was not meant to do. If this is the definition of hacking, installing Ubuntu on a brand-new machine is hacking.
Hacking means much more than just breaking into systems ...
I'm old enough to have lived through at least seven definitions of "hacker."
Including the one in the late 1970's when a hacker was someone who took public domain software and then sold it commercially with their own name on it.
if you used the word "Hacking" anywhere in your project i'm suprised Fable didn't downgrade you.
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