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Matsucom OnHand Wearable PC

Saw this on eBay... no one else bid on it? Are you serious? It's one of the first smart watches! It was also one of the first to have its own software development kit.

Totally reminiscent of a Casio, it's a chunk Matsucom OnHand PC which is actually the american clone of the Seiko Ruputer. In the package is a whole lot of documentation, software, the watch, a docking station and a cute little extra battery holder.

I expected CR2032 coin cell batteries, but it turns out it wanted CR2025s? I went off to find some...

Using it

I was immediately presented with "Fatal Error" after turning it on. The default action is to try and open "My Computer", so I assume that area of memory is crap.

I booted my Windows 98se VM and plugged through the serial port. We were connected in no time and I was straight-away warned that the internal memory was rubbish. A quick format later and I had a connected watch!

The file browser kept throwing an error that shortcut.ini was missing, so I created an empty file in the relevant directory, which successfully shut the error up. I wonder what software I can put on this thing?

The community still exists!

There's a whole raft of software at PC On Hand. This website actually has all the information you could ever want. If you're bored, it seems you can even convert movies into short animations to play on your watch.

I quickly downloaded the fishtank and copied it to the watch with zero effort required.

Yup... Fish. Worked nicely... EXF seems to be the compiled executable for the watch and it was seen as such in the file browser after copying. It's then a really quick navigation on the watch itself and, before you know it, you've got a mini aquarium on your wrist!

Software Development

PcOH-C For Windows is here, but they want you to register to download. I tried to do so, as I'm a legitimate human and was happy to see what random emails they wanted to send. Regardless, the signup process is dead... so the file is out of reach... or is it? I changed the URL from .asp to .zip and, you guessed it, the 1.6mb of glory downloaded. Here's a version just for keep-sake. The SDK is required, and that URL doesn't work either... so here's the entire product CD.

There's a few samples in PConH and I quickly compiled the first one. MAIN.EXF was created and I was able to upload it to the watch straight from the IDE. Before that though, the IDE has an emulator in it! You don't even need to deploy to your watch to test!

I copied it to the watch anyway...

It also executed perfectly fine and, as expected, the relevant indicator popped up when pressing the joystick directions. The best part was that you can do diagonal actions as well... might come in very handy for a game!

What's next? I think this watch deserves a mini-model-railway.