DRM Watch 3 Is Built To Actually Be Worn Every Day
drfailov's ESP32-S2 wearable runs for two weeks on a charge and leans on the unglamorous engineering — battery life, durability, backlighting — that most DIY smartwatch demos skip.
A lot of DIY smartwatch projects are built to demo well — a working prototype shown off in a video, with no real intention of strapping it on and wearing it through a normal week. DRM Watch 3, from developer drfailov, is explicitly built for the opposite goal.
What They Built
The watch is built around an ESP32-S2 paired with a 2.7-inch Sharp Memory LCD, a low-power reflective display technology that behaves a lot like e-paper without the slow refresh. A 450mAh battery gets the watch to roughly two weeks of runtime per charge, and the interface ships with a bilingual English/Ukrainian UI. Total parts cost lands around $70.
How They Did It
The build leans into details that matter for daily wear rather than a one-off demo: a custom-cut electroluminescent panel handles backlighting without washing out the Sharp LCD’s main power advantage, and the enclosure is designed to be either 3D printed or CNC-machined from metal, depending on how durable you want the final case to be. None of that is flashy, but it’s exactly the stuff that decides whether a DIY watch survives contact with real life.
Why It’s Worth Your Time
“Suitable for daily use” is the operative phrase in the project’s own framing — it’s a useful reminder that battery life and case durability are often the harder engineering problems in a smartwatch build, not the display or the firmware features.
Go See It
drfailov’s full source and design files are on GitHub, with project background also posted to Hackster.
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