WearPico Turns A Raspberry Pi Pico W Into A Full Smartwatch Platform

Most DIY smartwatch firmware projects start as a personal itch someone wants to scratch. WearPico started life as a university senior project at Yildiz Technical University’s Department of Computer Engineering, built by Umut Sevdi as a serious look at what it takes to make a microcontroller behave like a real wearable platform.

What They Built

WearPico is open-source firmware, written as a bare-metal C program with no underlying operating system, that turns a Raspberry Pi Pico W — or any other RP2040-based board — into a working smartwatch. Beyond timekeeping, alarms, and a stopwatch, it adds fitness tracking, note-taking, and temperature measurement when built with the full reference hardware: a round touchscreen, accelerometer, buzzer, and vibration motor.

How They Did It

The smartwatch side handles the embedded fundamentals, but what makes this a platform rather than just a firmware demo is the companion Android app, also open source, which connects over Bluetooth to manage notifications, call handling, and media playback control as background services. The watch sends requests to the phone and the app responds, splitting the work sensibly between constrained hardware and a device that already has the compute and connectivity to spare.

Why It’s Worth Your Time

Having the firmware, the Android app, and the 3D design files all released together — and all coming out of an academic project rather than a hobbyist’s spare-time build — gives WearPico a more complete starting point than most single-repo smartwatch projects.

Go See It

Umut Sevdi’s firmware is on GitHub, with the companion Android app in a separate repository, and Hackster covered the release.