Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch | Hacker News Reader

Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch

mikekasberg.com

110 pointsspeckx59 comments

One of my favorite cheap tech finds is a no-name, small OLED smartwatch that cost under $20. It has all the basic fitness features, an app that is surprisingly nicely done, and it exposes all its data to Apple Health.

It supports the limited notifications API that Apple exposes, so it buzzes for calls and can show you text messages you got. Does music control, raise to wake. And somehow with all of this, it has a battery life of about 10-15 days on a charge. Unbelievable that the Apple Watch adds really only two important features I care about (making your iPhone beep, and Apple Pay) but only lasts a single day on a charge, and costs nearly 10x what this one does.

Anyway, it also comes with about 100 choices of faces. I only wish it was open source or at least an "open" platform so that I could make my own.

Interesting, could you share the name/model? Thank you!

Sounds like a Xiaomi / amazfit kinda thing. You can get some amazing deals, or just check out AliExpress.

Ive been saying that apple could build a “band” accessible by everyone for $50. However Apple is run by wallstreet. Its not user first, but margin first.

seconding the request for the model name. Would love to hack away at this thing

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...

https://github.com/yodalf/coincan

I did exactly the same with my favorite 2014 Pebble app.

https://apps.repebble.com/nuovo-multi-timer_d0a1a7162b53466f...

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.

there are hardware mods iirc that let you use first gen iPads as external displays. Obviously the quality is late 00s , but better than just throwing it away.

good idea. I also hope this.

I’ve started doing this for myself with a productivity app. I’ve tried a bunch and they just were never exactly what I wanted. Now I can just have the robot vibe code me exactly what I need to help with the challenges I personally face. I don’t think I’ll ever make it public bc then I have to care what other people want. It’s refreshing to have an app just for me like a luxurious dish I don’t have to share

> 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?

All my slightly-technical friends refer to AI coding as Claude

And all of my non-techie friends refer to any kind of AI as ChatGPT.

> 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

It's adequate, but it is a little cramped

I wouldn't say 64kb of ram "plenty" in smartwatch world, barely enough for ble stack, RGB framebuffer and other stuff.

The pepple time 2 uses sf32lb52 mcu has 16MB of PSRAM.

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.

Any other recommendations for fun and cheap devices with open firmware? (Or easily customized with LLMs in other ways?)

Commenting so I can find this later

As a note, if you click on the 'time ago' to the right of the posters name on a post you like, you can get to the post specific screen where you can favourite comments.

I'm having fun with https://m5stack.com/

I bought the Tab5 to make my 2 year old daughter a little music station which can play 6 different songs just to cheap computer speakers over the 3.5mm jack so she can dance.

Planning to also give it a calendar mode to help her learn the days of the week and which days are preschool.

LLMs have just dramatically reduced the amount of time and thought investment it takes to experiment and crank out fun little projects.

I bought a cheap laptop to make a single purpose device for my mother in law. Basically a scan terminal. Connected to an old ScanSnap. Drives the scanner, handles cloud backup. Custom TUI.

Also, the XTEINK. Made it a single purpose flashcard learning device.

Lots of new devices thanks to good ol’ Santa Claude!

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.

> <..>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.)

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've been hacking with a FB Portal and its been a lot of fun to build out a personal home assistant with some unorthedox interfaces!

Within their walls, or is it open?

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.

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.

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.

Nice! This looks fun, maybe I'll need to try this next!

> 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?

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...

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.

> I think Fable would have probably been able to finish the work and get it pixel-perfect without supervision, if I gave it a feedback loop to screenshot the simulator.

Yeah, I think it's entirely possible for the AI to get to full autonomous development these days. It's impressive seeing how we no longer need any skill, we just desire something and the result gets spit out, no human investment needed beyond the initial request.

I wonder how hard it would be to connect the AI directly to the end user, and full remove human toil from everything but the final manual testing. I don't see that last step going away, since the AI doesn't know what the human desire was to verify that it got that part right

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.

if you used the word "Hacking" anywhere in your project i'm suprised Fable didn't downgrade you.

The PineTime watch unfortunately does not have any microphone, so there is no possibility of voice control.

Decompiling things with llms is a blast, until they refuse. Thankfully open source is catching up.

is there some hackable watch with MIP display for this price and without brick dimensions as watch in article (basically hackable new Amazfit Bip)?

If it is open source, is it still considered 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.

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.

it's the difference between "hacking" and "hacking on"

No it doesn't. Hacking meant something akin to "tinkering" long before it meant unauthorised compromise of a system.

You are saying exactly what I said in my first response.

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.

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