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.
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
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.
> 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?
> 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
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!
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
https://github.com/yodalf/coincan
> 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.
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!
> 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 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
Any other recommendations for fun and cheap devices with open firmware? (Or easily customized with LLMs in other ways?)
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!
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 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.
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.
Nice! This looks fun, maybe I'll need to try this next!
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
it's the difference between "hacking" and "hacking on"
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.