Retro-electro watches use dip-switches and turn-switches for operation

Watchismo's acquired distribution rights for Click Watches, mouth-wateringly dorky watches that you set with dip-switches and mechanical dial-selectors.

These new watches are reaching back into the glory days of electronics for their inaugural Dip Switch and Turn Switch timepiece collections. If you look at the circuit boards of any 80's arcade game or electronic device, you'd find these switches. Designed to be used on a printed circuit board along with other electronic components and are commonly used to customize the behavior of an electronic device for specific situations.

Click Watches have ingeniously re-appropriated these 'retro-tronics' into an entirely new way to show digital watch functions. Each switch activates a different function of the watch as seen in the diagram below. Functions ranging from bar graph metered time display, 12 hour and 24 hour digital time display, month, date, day of week and backlight. Stainless steel casing 42mm x 35mm.

Click Watches - The Coolest Watches from Watchismo.com

• [The Chemist]

  Cost: More than is justified by the technology obviously.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like it. It’s just sour grapes from someone who wishes he had more money.

• [jimkirk]

  Hopefully those switches only LOOK like the old DIP switches, as the originals had abysmal contact life.

• [Donald Petersen]

  These are, by far, the dorkiest things I’ve ever seen in my entire dorky life.  The bands alone scream to be wedgied, swirlied, and stuffed into a locker.  ”Aw, ma, you know I’m not like other guys.  I’m nervous and my socks are too loose.”  For me, the nostalgia is extra-heavy on the algia.

• [tristan eldritch]

  For a second, I thought the headline was going to read “Retro Electro Watches Use Dip-Sticks to Turn a Profit.”

• [Guest]

  So expensive… :( I want one in every color, they look like shiny candy and remind me of some watches of my Swatch collection (remember those? lol)… Especially the pop watches- right down to the bands.

• [penguinchris]

  I’d love to get a couple of these too, but I’d settle for just the bands, to use on watches I already have, if they sold them separately – so dorky (designed to look like ribbon cables)!

• [David Carroll]

  Pure dork with no compromises . I like that.

  What I don’t like is that state-of-the-art devices with turn switches I bought in 2000 are now considered retro. Of course I don’t miss lying on the floor of a rack room adjusting them.

• [Charlie Lesoine]

  The problem I could see happening with these is dip switches and turn switches are not designed to be durable enough to be used several times a day so they will probably fail pretty quickly. I wonder how long until they wear out.

• [awjt]

  “You know what you can do with that watch?”

• [Rob Beschizza]

  Understood. Bear in mind that Cory has no involvement with the sponsorship dealings: he just sees their thing here once a week like the rest of you. He posted something new there that he likes; nothing is vetted by others before it goes live.

  So, I understand the point of the complaint and we want to be aggressive about transparency and disclosure. As it is, we disclose that Watchismo’s a sponsor in a weekly post, and also in the thing it sponsors (email headlines) every time it goes out.

  We also write about all sorts of companies who have advertised here, even when those ads are live. And we’re fortunate enough here to have a sponsor who we’ve long adored and have posted about for years (long before the sponsorship began)

  So what about this one triggered the sponsordar? Is it because the post resembles the shout-outs?

  I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have something in the post so that readers know it’s a sponsor. I just don’t want to end up with a mess of disclaimers in every post that deals with a company that also runs ads here — what would you like to see?

• [Rob Beschizza]

  I am also moved to assert that the dorkliness of this design is profoundly newsworthy.

• [Watchismo]

  Hey everyone,

  We think it is worth mentioning that Cory has been featuring Watchismo related posts (both from our old blog The Watchismo Times and the Watchismo.com store) for many YEARS now!  Just do a search in their archives to see how far back that goes. 

  Only now do we currently sponsor BoingBoing and that’s purely because we love this site and appreciate what they do here.  We don’t advertise much but felt the BoingBoing audience couldn’t be a better fit for our curated approach to selling offbeat unusual timepieces you just don’t see very often.   Our sponsorship has NOTHING to do with Cory and his proclivities for horological oddities.  We hoped being a sponsor wouldn’t effect our editorial appeal and Cory has proved that to be true. 

  Mitch Greenblatt
  Co-owner & Founder – Watchismo.com

• [billstewart]

  Often I’d agree – but this batch of watches is way too expensive but really cool, in a nerdy 70s sort of way.   So to balance it out, we either need somebody to post plans for 3D printing something like it on a Makerbot, or at least somebody to post the Maker Shed solder-your-own-watch kit.

  (I wonder what the chances are that a posting about people selling this frequently-spamvertised  category of product gets through the filters the first time? :-)

• [John Ohno]

  The electronics and the programming in these should be very easy. With an AVR, a cheap LCD, a DIP switch, and four hours, a semi-competent programmer with no knowledge of electronics could construct and program a functional duplicate of the top watch up there. However, without a 3d printer (and maybe with a 3d printer) getting such slick casings will be both difficult and expensive. If you want to wear something like this on an altoids tin on your wrist, though, just drop twenty bucks and a couple hours of your life and it’s yours, sans instructions. (Writing the instructions would be significantly more difficult than figuring out how to build one yourself)