A lot of hacks get inspired by science fiction. When that inspiration is taken from the boob tube or the silver screen, the visual design is largely taken care of by the prop department. If, on the other hand, one seeks inspiration from the written word– like [Math Campbell] did for his smart pocket watch inspired by The Diamond Age— the visuals are much more up to the individual hacker. Though no nanotechnology was involved in its creation, we think [Math] nailed the Victorian High-Tech vibe of [Neal Stephenson]’s cult classic.

The build itself is fairly simple: [Math] started with a Waveshare dev board that got him the 1.75″ round touch display, along with an ESP32-S3 and niceties such as a six-axis IMU, an RTC, microphone, speaker, and micro SD card reader. That’s quite the pocket watch! The current firmware, which is available on GitHub, focuses on the obvious use case of a very stylish watch, as well as weather and tidal display. Aside from the dev board, [Math] needed only to supply a battery and a case.

[Math] designed the case for the watch himself in Fusion360 before sending it off to be 3D printed in stainless steel. That might not be molecular-scale manufacturing like in the book, but it’s still amazing you can just do that. Ironically, [Math] is a silversmith and will be recreating the final version of the watch case in sterling silver by hand. We’d be tempted to include a door–making it a “hunter’s case” in pocket watch lingo–to protect that amoled display, but far be it for us to tell an artist how to do his work. If you’re not a silversmith, [Math] has stated his intent to add STLs to the GitHub repo, though they aren’t yet present at time of writing.

We’ve featured smart pocket watches before, some with more modern aesthetics. Of course a watch doesn’t have to be smart to grace these pages.

Thanks to [Math Campbell] for the tip! If you’ve got time on your hands after ticking done on a project, send us a tip and watch for it to appear here.