Have an old cell phone laying around? Don’t know what to do with it? What if I told you that you could turn that old cell phone into a smartwatch!

What I’d like to do for this crazy/ambitions project is turn an old cell phone into a smartwatch. So obviously an old cell phone is required. The primary reason for this project is simply that I had an old cell phone laying around and wanted to find a creative way to repurpose it. The one I had is a Nokia 1100, but most other old cell phones would work, so long as you can find the schematics for the LCD online.

STEP 1

SCAVENGING PARTS

What I’d like to do for this crazy/ambitions project is turn an old cell phone into a smartwatch. So obviously an old cell phone is required. The primary reason for this project is simply that I had an old cell phone laying around and wanted to find a creative way to re-purpose it. The one I had is a Nokia 1100, but most other old cell phones would work, so long as you can find the schematics for the LCD online. Taking apart the 1100, there weren’t too many scavenge-able parts to choose from. First and foremost, there was the LCD screen, then I was also able to extract a vibrating motor, a small speaker, as well as a protective cover for the LCD. What you’re able to scavenge really depends on what type of phone you have, and how old it is. The older the phone, the more scavenge-able parts you will find.

……

STEP 4

WRITING TO THE LCD

The final key to making this LCD work is to program some code into the Arduino that sends text to the LCD. If I were to write the entire code from scratch, I would have to tell each Arduinopin what to display, how to display it, when to turn off, etc., which would take forever. Luckily this can be resolved through the use of libraries. I was able to find a couple of different libraries for the PCF8114, but I chose this one from Github user cattzalin because of its ability to display bitmaps.

You can download it, unzip it, and then move it to your Arduino libraries folder (check out this guide for more information). You can then open up the Arduino software and start writing some code. You can use my code below as reference, but basically I imported the library, set the variables for the type of screen I am using, and then I sent some text to the screen.

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	#include <PCF8814.h>
	static const byte ledPin = 13;
	static const byte LCD_WIDTH = 96;
	static const byte LCD_HEIGHT = 65;
	static PCF8814 lcd;
	void setup() {
	lcd.begin(LCD_WIDTH, LCD_HEIGHT);
	pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
	lcd.print(“The LCD Totally Works!“);
	delay(5000);
	lcd.clear();
	}
	void loop() {
	lcd.setCursor(0, 0);
	lcd.print(“Visit my website“);
	lcd.setCursor(40, 1);
	lcd.print(“at:“);
	lcd.setCursor(0, 2);
	lcd.print(“www.tinkernut.com“);
	delay(5000);
	}

view rawsimple_arduino_smartwatch.ino hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Plugin your Arduino, upload the code, and if everything works right, you should see your text on the screen! Now that we have our LCD functioning, we can move on to the next step!

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