Re: How did it work?

On Nov 20, 4:11 pm, "Jack Denver" <nunuv...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In the mid 70s, after the pushbutton activated LED watches came on the
market , there was a lot of interest in wrist motion activated designs. See
this whole series of patents, which list some of the different ways of
accomplishing this:

http://www.patentgenius.com/class/368/225.html

As someone said, there were a number of different approaches - switches with
little internal swing hammers, mercury switches, etc. Reading the patents
will give you many of the details.

The introduction of "always on" LCD displays killed off these designs for
the most part, though there are still some that use these techniques to
activate the backlight. The problem with all these designs setting the
balance between "false positives" and "false negatives" - if you make the
required motion too gentle, then normal activity will turn the watch on
constantly and run the battery down, if you make it too stiff, people will
try to activate and nothing will happen.

My guess is that if the need for these things had continued, eventually they
would have come up with a "smart" design that looked for a certain pattern
that could only (or mostly) be created with an intentional gesture - for
example , rotating your wrist right-left-pause-right in a certain short time
interval.

Speaking of "always on" displays, I just read about the new Kindle book
reader being promoted by Amazon - it has a new type of "electronic ink"
display which does not require backlighting and looks much like ink on
paper. http://www.eink.com/technology/howitworks.html

It uses charged ink particles, both black and white, to create a high
contrast display. What you see is not an illusion created by tricks with
polarized light but actual black ink. The technology lends itself to curved
and flexible displays.

I wonder if this technology will make its way into watches, perhaps built
into a soft wrist band for comfortable wearing? I don't know whether the
power demands are too great at present, but it sounds promising. In
addition to the usual digital display,you could do an analog face that looks
like a black on white enamel dial, but it could be roman, arabic, etc.
according to your whim (or white on black). I have a cell phone that has a
front display that can be made to look like a square roman analog watch -
unfortunately it only comes on momentarily when you push a button - an e-ink
display would be perfect for this.

<cuhu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:5299-4741F4D9-917@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In the 1970s, I owned a quartz wristwatch which required me to quicky
flick my wrist to make the watch show the time.How did it work?
cuhulin


Excellent! Thank you for your contribution.

Finally Dali's pictural vision of Time could become true!

http://haringliwanag.pansitan.net/uploaded_images/D115DALI-761111.JPG

(Persistence of Memory)

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