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Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch


Documenting an attempt to build a single-purpose smartwatch.

something simple, no bells & whistles that would distract my son during school, that didn’t require a ton of effort to configure that would stand up to playing on the playground or baseball/soccer field, and survive the occasional rainfall or splash that would pass for a real consumer smartwatch that provided reliable CGM data on demand that provided haptic feedback at important moments like “urgent low BG soon” and “high BG for over an hour” Apple also references a lot of opaque heuristics that consider how often the app is open and in use, how much battery life is left, what else is happening, and all of that changes over time as the OS learns more about usage. MJF was the winner: it’s affordable, the prints were extremely accurate, the nylon material very durable even when I pushed past the 1mm minimum thickness recommendation, and it has this satisfying, random, grainy surface texture.

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Photo of Scratch

Scratch

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son

Photo of T1D smartwatch

T1D smartwatch

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