Hacking with Claude on a $27 Smart Watch
A developer used Claude and open-weight models to build a custom Casio-style watch face for the $27 PineTime smart watch, replicating a design from a tweet. The project took a few hours, with the watch streaming a fullscreen background image from its file system due to memory limits. Code and an AGENTS.md guide are on GitHub.
The low-stakes environment (not production code at my day job) makes me feel like I can try whatever I want and iterate quickly, and it’s really rewarding to work on firmware for a physical device that I can hold and use when I’m done building it!
- kixiQu
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.
- realo
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...
- wxw
> 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?
- TravisBarton
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!
- yjftsjthsd-h
> 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/