Watchy V3

I have read quite a few complaints about the Watchy V3. I try not to listen too much to bad press. A lot of the time it's over the top. I ordered a replacement Watchy from Mouser Electronics. You don't really know what version of the Watchy you're buying in my experience, and just figuring out the correct libraries to use can be a journey in of itself. But after 24 hours of using it, I've noticed one serious problem.

The V3's ESP32s3 board does not keep time correctly. For a watch, that's undoubtedly not ideal. I'm not exactly experienced enough in micro controllers to figure out why, or to make my own firmware. There is other, apparently better firmware, but I like simple things, I don't want to connect to wifi.

I did also notice that the V3 burns through the battery a lot quicker. My options were:

• (Easiest) Figure out the time drift and correct it, but this could be inaccurate over time
• (Harder) Remove a button from the V3 board, and use it to repair my V1 or V2 board, whichever it is, I don't know, I run V1 firmware on it so maybe it's that

The project looks like it may be abandoned by SQFMI. I'm not sure. If they ever release a V4 and it looks as though the V3's issues have been addressed, I'll probably buy it. But for the time being, I decided I will try use a V3 button to replace the broken one on my old board. The old board keeps time impeccably, and the battery lasts for weeks at a time, easily over a month on one charge for my use case.

I haven't done a lot of soldering. I used to repair my electric guitar, which was just soldering wires together, no printed circuit boards there. Soldering the tiny connection points on Watchy's PCB was scary, but I managed it. Unfortunately, you need a pin to pop the button off of the board from underneath, and once that's off, I'm not really sure about how to secure it again. Nonetheless, I tried, and it worked. I had 4 working buttons on my (maybe) V1 again.

But, the solder wasn't enough on it's own to secure to the button well enough. After putting it all back on the case I got about 50 button clicks before the new button broke off. It has only disconnected, and not fully broken like the button that originally begun this roundabout saga. I will try to figure out a way to secure the button, because I liked my Watchy - but I have ordered a Bangle 2 JS. It's not as down and dirty as the Watchy, but the build quality looks promising, and I suppose I can make it as smart, or in my case, dumb as I want it to be.

I'm chalking this one down as a loss, and maybe the most expensive button replacement I will ever do. Annoyingly, I opted for a new board when I ordered the chronologically impaired V3 instead of a replacement button because I was nervous about what might happen if I attempted the repair. And now I have two Watchy boards with 3 buttons each instead of 4. I might make use of what remains of them and maybe make some mini E-Ink displays. A simple web request is built into the firmware, so maybe I could tweak the existing firmware or strip it down to do something interesting. Waste not want not.