Now you've had your watch for a few days/weeks/months and you want to come up with your own watch designs. Lucky for you, this watch is designed specifically to be super easy to hack! If you know how to program Arduino, you're basically already there.

You'll need the Arduino IDE, and also some knowledge of how to read and write Arduino code.

To program the watch itself, you'll need an FTDI cable or FTDI Friend. This will connect your computer to the watch. If you're using an FTDI cable or anything other than the Friend, you'll also need some extra long header to press-fit.

Simply place a 6-pin extra long header into the FTDI connector and slip the other end into the top of the watch PCB, to match this photo.  Be sure to have a battery in the watch, as it does need to be powered while programming!


Next, download the TIMESQUARE watch codebase from github. Visit the github page and click on DOWNLOAD to download the ZIP file and uncompress the folder.
Rename the folder to Watch (check that the renamed folder contains the Watch.cpp and Watch.h files) and install into the arduinosketches/libraries folder. For information how to use and install libraries, see our tutorial!

Restart the IDE

When programming, select Lilypad Arduino w/ ATmega328 as the "board" type

This guide was first published on Nov 30, 2012. It was last updated on Dec 05, 2012.

This page (Uploading New Firmware) was last updated on Nov 29, 2012.

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