Who is first then .... Devon Belt Watch
Discussion
Shame it's a bit out of reach at $15,000 ...I love it too - big price tag, but the technology is innovative so they've got to get some return on the R&D, I suppose. If they can bring prices down rather than stay within high horology (do they have the heritage to do that?) then they'll sell loads… Urwerk for the masses, so to speak 
cyberface said:
I love it too - big price tag, but the technology is innovative so they've got to get some return on the R&D, I suppose. If they can bring prices down rather than stay within high horology (do they have the heritage to do that?) then they'll sell loads… Urwerk for the masses, so to speak
I was thinking similar - If the cost of the watch roughly converts from $15,000 to approximately £9,400, then that doesn't seem too bad in comparison to other belt driven/unusual watches e.g. Urwerk, Harry Winston, Monaco V4 ... 
Ikemi said:
cyberface said:
I love it too - big price tag, but the technology is innovative so they've got to get some return on the R&D, I suppose. If they can bring prices down rather than stay within high horology (do they have the heritage to do that?) then they'll sell loads… Urwerk for the masses, so to speak
I was thinking similar - If the cost of the watch roughly converts from $15,000 to approximately £9,400, then that doesn't seem too bad in comparison to other belt driven/unusual watches e.g. Urwerk, Harry Winston, Monaco V4 ... If it was mechanical as per the watches I suggested and you listed, then yes.
But it's a boggo quartz watch with the stepper motors turning belts rather than hands on dials and toothed wheels - watching the video on Engadget made me feel bitterly disappointed
It operates *just* like Swatch's 'retrograde' jazzed-up quartz movements - the stepper motors are just programmed to do fancy things, ultimately the timekeeping is battery quartz and it's more of a display of miniaturised *electromechanical* technology than miniaturised mechanical marvels. And no, Spring Drive is a proper watch. And also no, connecting the stepper motors to belts and then having a custom ASIC built that integrates the logic with a boggo quartz module isn't actually *that* impressive, technically. The battery life isn't much cop, because the motors are moving quite large belts.
The engineering issues that the mechanical guys had with the watches above (and I'm thinking especially of the Monaco V4 here, because the tiny belts had to transmit all the torque from the *entire* drivetrain back to the mainspring and posed real materials-science challenges) are moot with this gadget, because running each belt independently on its own bearings with separate stepper motors isn't an engineering challenge (well I haven't done it, so I can be called on this, I guess) and just reduces battery life. It's not as if new composite belt fabric technology was needed, and the electronics involved in the demo shown in the Engadget video could be prototyped in an FPGA by my mate Ian in a week and then built as a custom ASIC the week later, I bet. Actually, the watch is so big that you could just use the FPGA, they're small enough these days.
So R&D costs - assuming I'm not missing something enormous - sod all. Take one existing quartz clock module, one FPGA, and spend a week coding up the logic, then connect it up to commodity stepper motors already used in quartz chronos. Use the high-torque ones like the ones that drive central split-seconds chrono hands on the ETA quartz split-second movement - on reset both hands spin round from wherever they were in precise 1-second increments back to zero within a second, which should be torquey enough to turn a lightweight belt on pulleys mounted on roller bearings. It may be cheaper to use ruby bearings, pins on the pulley drums and lubrication like traditional mechanical watches - certainly less R&D. Getting bespoke roller bearings made would cost but would just be a spec to a custom engineering shop. Then bung in a battery and hey-ho. There's some guff about it being bulletproof, presumably the case is made of thick enough polycarbonate to take a 9mm round? All of my Oakley sunglasses are similarly marketed as bulletproof to a specific degree - in the case of the Oakleys, shot from a normal 12-bore won't get through the lens material. Nowhere near a 9mm round from close range but the watch is probably a lot thicker.
Really disappointed. This one's a duffer, I'm afraid, unless I've missed some engineering triumph that got lost in the bulls
t that passes as a website. I'll run it past my old uni mate Ian, if my gut feeling is correct, he'll say he could bodge up an FPGA to do it all within a day Modern FPGAs probably already have the quartz oscillator built in to the chip package, it'd merely be a case of soldering wires to the battery and stepper motors and crown, and programming it...Gassing Station | Watches | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff