Belt-driven Devon Tread watches

New in the Watchismo Vault collection, the $17,500 Devon Tread watches, which use a cunning system of belts and optical sensors to keep and display the time. No, I don't have $17.5K to drop on something like this, but if you asked me to imagine what a $17.5K watch should look like, it would be something much like this: "The exposed movement is a mesmerizing display of the patented interwoven system of conveyor belts. This series of belts includes critical elements that allow the optical recognition system to know every belt position at all times."

Devon Tread

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://artdonovan.typepad.com Art

Quite an impressive horological contraption. A Great piece, for sure.

But the Devon logotype, tied in as a metal ligature……. A poor design choice.
- http://www.facebook.com/JohnDrach John Drach
  
  I agree, like most things that are beautiful, the logo isnt a good part of the design
http://www.soulrecycler.com/ Patter Light Grey

why no live in action shots,I mean for 18k you would think there are some videos.
- aaronmhill
  
  No, no, don’t get up. I’ll find the video for you. One sec….
  http://www.watchismo.com/devon-tread-a-watch.aspx
Lobster

Cool? Yes. Worth more than a reasonably priced car? Probably not.
- morcheeba
  
  Depends on how many reasonably priced cars you already have… if you’ve already got two, then, yeah, this is more useful than a third.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    I have five reasonably-priced cars, and only one of them approached the cost of this watch. Come to think of it, of the cars I’ve owned in the last twenty years, I acquired six of them for less money in total than this watch goes for.
    
    But that’s because I’ve had a lifetime of cheap-ass transportation. Even my only skateboard was secondhand.
    - Lobster
      
      You own five cars? At the same time?
suburbanhick

…just don’t drop it!
joeposts

Nice watch. The belts remind me of my old job at the cheese packaging factory. All that is missing are miniature pieces of cheese being transported by the miniature conveyor belts, and a miniature quality assurance technician picking out the discoloured or chipped pieces and throwing them in a locked bin to prevent garbage theft.

Hey, for $18,000 I can imagine anything I want.
- Lobster
  
  There comes a time when every man must pause and consider the decisions he’s made in life that have lead him to steal reject cheese out of the trash.
  - http://www.facebook.com/Curlee187 Brandon Curlee
    
    There also comes a time when one needs to step back and consider the decisions society and corporations have made that would lead to them throwing away perfectly good cheese simply because it is off color or chipped, while people are starving.
    - Lobster
      
      I’m not sure it’s any real kindness to feed the starving with copious amounts of cheese. I mean, that stuff’s pretty good in moderation, but…
Alan Olsen

The watch needs to play Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” as an alarm.
nixiebunny

This watch needs a “demo mode” so you can show off all the belt action. It would go through a battery daily, though.
- cuffbuster
  
  It does have a demo mode, when shutting off or on, the belts go into a fury of rotation while the optical system lines them up perfectly, see it in action here: http://youtu.be/ECkzBJUdGYc
  - Donald Petersen
    
    Wow, that is genuinely awesome.
  - nixiebunny
    
    I mean a demo mode that ‘s easily accessible, so that you can show everyone who asks “What is that?” how the belts move. The seconds belt will move every five seconds, but that’s not all that exciting. Gotta catch the wearer at xx:59:55 for the whole show.
Anne Onimos

There’s something very unseemly about a publication such as yours shilling ~$17000 toys.

Also, Watchismo is a sponsor of Boing Boing, is it not? Aren’t these posts usually headlined “Sponsor Shout-Out” and tagged “sponsors”?
- AirPillo
  
  It’s not exactly unethical to talk about something you think is cool without qualifying it as an advertisement… especially if you’re saying it entirely because you actually think it’s cool, not because a sponsor sells it.
  - cuffbuster
    
    Again, Cory has been posting Watchismo stuff for years, long before they were a sponsor, just search the BB archives… He’s a timepiece freak.
    - Blaine Hofeling
      
      Well, it does blur journalistic integrity without an editorial disclaimer about the relationship. What is really, um, interesting, is when we, here in the comments, point this out, our comments tend to end up getting deleted by the Boing Collective (to be replaced with admin’s and mod’s posts explaining away the issue, and posts from the fellow who owns Watchismo further explaining the issue. That got weird some months back).
      
      I think we’re fine with Cory being a gadget freak. Hell, we all are, and we’re fine with Boing being buddybuddy with their sponsors, but with Watchismo ads appearing inline with blog posts, and Cory’s frequent posts about Watchismo inventory, it is straight up muddy.
      
      I frequent this place less and less now. I was compelled a while back to order a new watch from Watchismo, but I do feel kind of, um, for lack of a better term; swindled, a bit. Just a bit.
      
      Just put in a disclaimer, guys, when Cory wants to nerd out on a watch from the sponsor. That’s all ‘cha gotta do.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        What is really, um, interesting, is when we, here in the comments, point this out, our comments tend to end up getting deleted by the Boing Collective
        
        Yeah, it’s fascinating that we don’t want to have the exact same off-topic whining showing up in every post that features a product. Just fucking fascinating.
- http://orbitnet.com JIMWICh
  
  http://twitpic.com/8ns5gs
- cuffbuster
  
  Cory has been posting Watchismo stuff for years, long before they were a sponsor, just search the BB archives…
SamSam

This is cool until you notice the big curved plastic (polycarbonate) cover on top of it all. They’ve made it super-transparent in the image above, but it’s many times more visible in the second video on their product page, and reflects a big glare.

It takes a cool tactile piece and makes it look like a plastic toy.
http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce

Let’s take that bad boy for a swim!
http://twitter.com/gotNIEM Tom Carlson

Before folks get all worked up over the price, keep in mind that shipping is free.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1696651026 Steve Rogne
  
  Indeed. I’d fully expected to have to add another $7,500 of watches to my cart to qualify for free shipping.
- millie fink
  
  For real. Who would even care about shipping costs if they’ve got money like that for a friggin watch?
  - fakephilschiller
    
    Imagine – just for a second – that he was being sarcastic. Just imagine it.
semiotix

Finally, a wristwatch that lets you worry about battery life!
vonbobo

“critical elements that allow the optical recognition system to know every belt position at all times ”

why is that? so the watch knows exactly what time is actually being displayed? Meaning, the belts aren’t really keeping accurate time, but just displaying it?
- nixiebunny
  
  The belts only display the time that the quartz watch keeps track of. Casio watches with hands work the same way.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Could be those “critical elements” are simply the sprocket holes (or “perfs” in film parlance) that keep the belts from slipping. I wouldn’t have thought it’d need any OCR system at all if it’s tractor-fed rather than friction-fed.
  - nixiebunny
    
    Any system that moves a thing with a motor needs to know where the thing is currently located, so that it can be sent to the correct position. This is done with an index sensor. For example, an extra hole punched at a known position in the belt may be sensed optically. How they do that in this tiny machine is a good question.
    - Donald Petersen
      
      I’d have thought that the drive gear itself would be indexed like the timing sprocket at the end of a car engine crankshaft, since the perfs keep the belts from slipping. But I’m no watchsmith; I’m sure these guys know what they’re doing.
      - nixiebunny
        
        You can see the drive gears; they’re much smaller than the belt length, so they cannot indicate the position of the belt to the computer. It has to watch the sprocket holes in the belt itself to learn where the belt is. Or some similar trick based on the belt rather than the gears. (Disclaimer: I work on telescopes, so I know all about making wristwatches. OK, really, I make wristwatches, so I know all about making telescopes. Something like that.)
        
        Edit – the reason that an index signal is needed is that the computer doesn’t know which digit the belt is displaying. How can it get that information from the gear? The gear makes many revolutions for one belt revolution.
      - Donald Petersen
        
        Again, I’m no watchmaker and I’m sure the guys who made this thing wouldn’t have utilized an optical recognition system if they didn’t need to (although this isn’t exactly the poster watch for utilitarian design), but your explanation doesn’t make sense to me. The computer need only count the revolutions of the drive motor shaft. The belt is designed not to slip, so a constant multiplier would be required for each digit. It’s difficult for me to judge based on the still frame above, but it looks like there are three perfs per digit for the hours belt, so that belt should have 36 perfs in total (assuming it’s a 12-hour rather than 24-hour clock). If the drive gear has six teeth (which looks likely), then six revolutions take you through twelve hours, every time.
        
        So I’m not sure why they couldn’t monitor the revolutions of the drive gear itself rather than the belt, unless your point is that the drive gear itself is too small to trigger any kind of revolution-counting system, which for all I know might be the case. But theoretically it shouldn’t be problematic.
      - Donald Petersen
        
        Ah, I understand your point now. Seeing the watch aligning its belts in the video Cuffbuster posted above demonstrates the need for optical alignment, since the four belts apparently run independently of each other. But if they operated by more traditional clockwork (not as a circular clockface, but in a manner wherein a full revolution of the second hand physically drives a 6 degree movement on the minute hand, and a full revolution of the minute hand physically drives a 6 degree movement of the hour hand), then an optical system would be unnecessary, since the belts would have to be synchronized with each other exactly once, during assembly at the factory, and would never get out of sync with each other.
        
        And man, would that watch be a bitch to set. Either you’d have to have a mechanism to disconnect the seconds belt from the minute and hour belts, or you’d have to spend most of an hour setting the watch (if it’s more than a few hours slow or fast) or risk breaking belts.
hostile_17

Love it!

Makes me think of something from the Dharma Initiative. :)
- http://redesigned.com redesigned
  
  when the red hieroglyphics show up and the watch starts beeping, press the button!
http://dustindriver.com dustindriver

It’s like, how much more awesome could this watch be? None more awesome.

Next they should build one the size of a house that runs on diesel.
SCAQTony

It is an amazing piece of industrial inspired technology but the case size; 53mm wide, is to garish for anyone over 30. In fact, anything over 40mm starts to become ostentatious and reeks of “bling” in my opinion. The Casio G-Shock line come in at around 43mm each and they are large watches. Eninem wears a G-Shock. It looks like an abalone shell on his wrist but he is not a tall person. If you are tall and have large wrists, the Devon may look real sharp on you.
- http://twitter.com/EsElQueso Adam Gillitt
  
  It looks amazing, and totally appeals to the watch lover in me… but damn, it is GINORMOUS! http://www.watchismo.com/images/products/detail/tread1fashionshotmale.jpg
  - nixiebunny
    
    I’m sure that Casio could get it down to a reasonable size in about four product generations, if there were a market of more than 10 people in the world.
jimh

Cool- but I’m poor, have slender wrists, and an ex named Devon. So, three strikes.
the lurch

It’s not new…it’s been out for a few years at least. I think it’s cool, but not for 17K. I mean, it’s an electrical movement. The major challenge when designing a watch like this is getting enough power from a movement of reasonable size. Even then, you need to regulate that movement. That’s where a lot of the R&D goes. Given an electric motor, you can be somewhat lax on how careful you address mass and friction. If you want to see the real deal check: http://www.cabestan.ch/pages.php?page=creations
TooGoodToCheck

It’s a neat watch. And yet I find that the juxtaposition with the Goats post is just making me think, I could fund the remainder of the Goats storyline, and still have 7K left over.
Jorpho

I like that it’s digital. Too many of these fancy pieces are analog.

But then, it’s probably a good deal more fragile than the typical fancy analog watch, too, what with all the extra moving parts.
http://profiles.google.com/bentobjects Terry Border

Looks super neat, but I’m sure those belts hardly ever go off track, at all.
Teller

Beautiful. Like a multi-gauge film projector.
Donald Petersen

I must have gremlin blood in me. I have an almost irresistible urge to throw a teensy little wrench into the works.
Bahumat

Ordinarily I dislike most of these Watchismo ads, but I have to say, that watch is pretty fuckin’ cool.

But $17,500k? Good lawd, wat. Honestly, it’s begging for a knock-off to be made and sold for… 1% of the price, and that’s still a stretch.
- morcheeba
  
  I pretty much guarantee that you’re not going to find a $175 knockoff, or even a $1750 knockoff. Knockoffs use cheap standardized movements, and re-engineering that here would be hard. $17,500 is actually a very good price, considering that everything in that watch is custom.
  - jimh
    
    It may be a “very good price”, but $17.5k buys a lot of rice and beans, nawamean?
    - SCAQTony
      
      Look, today’s technology is tomorrow’s art! Any watch over $5,000 is intended to be an “artifact” if you will not a watch. If you want a watch that tells perfect time and that is your sole goal, get a Casio F91W for $12.50 at Sears. It’s military grade and Wikipedia tells me it is the favorite of terrorists. Ironically the Casio G-Shock line is military grade as well and is a favorite of our armed forces. So there you have it: you can get a military grade timepiece for under $90.
      
      But if you want a piece of art that a watchmaker nearly went blind creating, or an engineer that wanted to tell time in a way that has never been done before which includes a moon-phase, chronograph and world time and they are a limited few, get the Devon or otherwise.
z7q2

Nice.

Now make a Napier’s Bones watch. Out of wood.
WaylonWillie

Neat! I would definitely pay $150 for that.
Daniel Smith

What they fail to mention in the article is the “transformer” function, whereby you can ride your watch to work. Which makes this positively cheap!
http://twitter.com/last808 Lance A

Pretty, and expensive. If only they could get a quad tourbillon in there and really crank up the already sky high price.
David Kopelman

want!
http://vimrc-dissection.blogspot.com/ Dummy00001

> [...] if you asked me to imagine what a $17.5K watch should look like [...]

If you asked me, then a $17.5K watch shouldn’t look anything. it should be nearly invisible wherever it is strapped, quickly telling me time in most convenient fashion with least hand movements involved.

That above is not a watch: it is a design/fashion/luxury item, accidentally having a shape of a watch. Litmus test: nobody who actually needs a wrist watch would even think buying it.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Litmus test: nobody who actually needs a wrist watch would even think buying it.
  
  Nobody who actually needs a car to get around in would seriously consider buying a Lamborghini Countach either, but that doesn’t stop it from being an actual automobile. Also, someone who did buy it would probably glance at it to check the time rather than consult a different timepiece somewhere in the room. It’s just that some people have more money to spend on trifles like this than the rest of us do. It doesn’t mean this thing is, like, useless at being a timepiece. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that part of the justification of the price would have to be that this watch keeps reasonably good time.
- http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker
  
  When you’re paying $17.5k for a watch, you’re probably not wanting an efficient timepiece – the Casio F91W that’s been mentioned earlier meets that need for $10 or so. Or, I paid $11 for a CA53W, if you want a calculator thrown in.
  
  When you’re paying $17.5k for a watch, you’re probably wanting jewelry. Which this definitely is.
IceCream

If you are going to do horoporn, might as well go all the way. I choose the $265,000 Trapezium.

Is it worth it? You bet it is. Because “regardless of the viewing angle, a trapezium is visible.”

Now that’s value for money.
ROSSINDETROIT

I’m a Watch Guy and this isn’t my kind of thing but it’s very impressive. I wouldn’t wear it but if I had one I’d sure spend a lot of time looking at it.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

That is a goddamned thing of beauty.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_P3STHOKFWOKXO4OJJGK2EGOTQE lovehates777

The beauty of this thing is the mechanism itself. A great piece of engineering.
- guanto
  
  But isn’t it ultimately extremely impractical? Takes a whole lot of time when the hour and minutes both change, meaning you have to wait at least 10 seconds to read the time.
  
  The perfect Vertu phone companion ;-).
francoisroux

This post is worthless without a video showing the movement in action. Since I can’t even begin about ever affording something like this, I’d love to just see it work…
- cuffbuster
  
  http://youtu.be/ECkzBJUdGYc
- jimh
  
  If you follow the link, lazywebs, the video is RIGHT THERE.
L_Mariachi

So it’s 56:04:910 in the year 1001? Glad the metric system is finally taking off.
askjacob

I can’t reply to your later post…

I have worked on a similar display mechanism before… it is because the belt mechanism is a simple state machine, all the “internal clock” knows is how to advance the belts and track them based on if it has current knowledge of their location, but if the motor drive battery goes flat for example, or the watch is “booted” for the first time, the drive circuitry has no idea what the status of any of the belt positions are.

Those “index” holes I assume are basic sprocket drive holes. Somewhere on each belt is also a “zero” home index (maybe a hole, maybe a reflective patch on the back of the belts), which you can see the watch cycle each belt looking for in one of the videos on first start up… once it “knows” the status of each of the belts, as you say it can pretty much ignore the sensors as it knows it can keep track of the display just by knowing how many units i has advanced each belt. Still, if you have the sensor there it pays to use it and keep track of things anyway, just to confirm everything is as you expect it to be. You can see once it finds the status of the belts it zips them to their correct display locations pretty quick.
- SCAQTony
  
  You are so very boss to include that. Yes you are a watch guy
  - askjacob
    
    Heheh, no, I like overly dramatic display devices I guess… And this is like if you were to combine a harley davidson motorcycle, skeleton clock and wristwatch, so seems to float my boat – if not for the price though :) I am though, a definate back-yard hacker and love all things fiddly and like to pull ‘em apart in my head if I can;t do it for real…
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WIH6O3KGAELLONCRNVD72XBWDM Robert Sanders

Please help me; I’m looking for a job that will allow me to easily afford that watch!
- SCAQTony
  
  You have to create your own – welcome to the “new normal”
redjon

They’ll never break even with that price, but it’s definitely a cool gadget!
http://profile.yahoo.com/6UU5LHV7PGO3UDHU44ZGHSTPBU ThomasM

So… question. In three months, is the paint on on the tread going to break off? Seeing how it’s being bent around the edges. Just sayin..