My Inner Nerd Tingles – TI EZ430-Chronos Watch

I’ve been pondering the purchase of another watch ever since I caught the band of my existing watch in the mouth of my lovely husky puppy Aurora.  Only recently did I find a watch that piqued my curiosity – the Relic ZR5505 Moving Color Silver Dial Watch.  The only bit of interest was the face of the watch which sports an interesting LCD display.  Unfortunately, that LCD display didn’t do anything useful like the watch from Stranger than Fiction, so it was merely a conversation starter and distraction.

But today I saw a posting about the TI Ez430-Chronos, a fully programmable watch with pressure sensors, a 3-axis accelerometer, temperature sensor, altimeter, and a wide variety of other nerdy goodness AND it includes the tools for developing new firmware and interfacing the watch with the computer.  The possibilities are nearly endless, and my inner nerd can hardly wait until February 2010 for it to finally become available.

Oh.. and it was only $49 + shipping.  Oh wait… no it was $25 because some helpful co-nerd posted a coupon code for $24 off.  My total cost was just over $30 with shipping.  I figure that if nothing else it satisfies my desire for a new watch, and it has all kinds of cool functionality built in with the prospects for even crazier functionality to be added later.

I already predict cult-like community similar to that which follows the TI-83+ for this watch, support and added functionality.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve messed with any real sort of programming, and really my best programs were written for the TI-83+ so this echos deeply with my desire to have something fun to work with.

As mentioned, I probably won’t actually see the watch until sometime in February 2010, but until then I can dream up fun things to try with it.  Given the amount of time since I’ve actually programmed anything though, I’ll probably have to start with blinking some LED segments (of which there are 96!) but I can work my way up from there.

NERDGASM!