2026-10-09
Emulator 1.1 and a new site face.
The site is reskinned in the Frontier Moto language: hairline rules, square corners, a bento grid, Instrument Sans with an Instrument Serif italic wordmark, Handjet for technical labels, one accent (#FFE101) on ash and onyx, and a full-viewport hero. The E favicon replaces the blue dial.
The emulator moves to 1.1 with it. The canvas renders at 3× so faces stay sharp, all screens set in Handjet, and three faces are reworked: home splits the date against the time group, the compass becomes a tick-ring instrument with baro readout, and workout and stopwatch get zeroed clocks, an HR lock spinner, and lap capture.
2026-09-06
One name, one display, one site.
The project had accumulated three working names: Trek Watch on the studio site, Calm-Tech Watch in the specification, Beben Watch OS in the third emulator. Today all of it becomes the Essential Watch, and the repository is renamed to match.
The display decision moves with it: spec v6 replaces the e-paper panel with a monochrome OLED. E-paper promised sunlight readability and near-zero static draw, but the emissive panel fits the baseline emulator's screen character, reads at night without a lamp module, and turns restraint into physics: one ink, one ground, a 1-bit interface. The trade-offs, daylight washout, burn-in discipline, a battery budget that now depends on the dim-state duty cycle, are written into the spec as open items rather than wished away.
And the project gets this website: five pages, plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no build step. A place to keep track of the whole thing as the industrial design skills, the engineering, and the taste grow together.
2026-07-11
Spec v5: the watch on paper.
The specification reaches draft v5: a 42 by 36 by 9 millimetre CNC aluminum case at roughly 29 grams, 10 ATM, contactless Hall-effect buttons with a rotary crown, LRA haptics benchmarked against the Taptic Engine, piezo chimes, and a 30 day battery target. The display is e-paper at this point, with a bonding and mounting strategy flagged for drop-test validation.
Eighteen open items ship with the draft, from piezo placement to the deliberate include-or-exclude call on games. The list is the point: undecided is a state, not an embarrassment.
2026-04-27
A precision emulator, third try.
The third emulator concept goes bigger: a large round canvas, touch-first interaction, a chassis rendered in CSS. It explores where the interface could go with more pixels and a finger instead of keys.
It stays an archive piece. The conclusion it earns: the restraint of the 128 by 64 baseline is the product, not a constraint to escape.
2025-11-20
Emulator 1.0: the baseline.
The first working watch OS simulation: a 128 by 64 monochrome panel, cyan on black, driven by a game loop and a Mode class hierarchy in a single HTML file. Keyboard controls stand in for the physical buttons and crown, and simulated sensors feed the screens.
Five years of F-91W affection and one month of JavaScript produce something that already feels like a watch. This is the look and the architecture the project builds on.