Simple questions like what time is it ? Answers that on the go might seem easy at first. Clocks & their miniaturized versions, wrist watches were no easy feat to invent or manufacture! Precision machining of very small intricate parts that must all fit together with very close tolerance on a device the works reliably #engineering /
A very significant part of the economy of Switzerland due to the Swiss watch industry, some of which became luxury icons like Rolex, even though that brand started in London England.
Today its logic chips in smartwatches & IoT fitness trackers & smart rings & other wearable bling that defines the 2020 era, along with COVID19 global viral outbreak. Wearable information jewelry, first to tell you what time it is ? perhaps to tell you where exactly you are at, or how to get where you want to be going & also what was that last text message & who is calling ? Even some analog faced smart watches with sweeping hands for the minute & hour have a small LCD to summarize your latest notifications, streaming over wifi or bluetooth from your smartphone //
Pocket watches are probably one of the first advanced technologies that people carried around in their pockets, wearable if you will. Now you can mount a cell phone to your wrist with an stand alone 5G/ LTE enhanced Apple Watch Series 7 GPS+ Cellular that has its own data plan if your into that kind of thing. Wearable's now include smart rings like the Gen. 3 by Oura https://ouraring.com/ that pack wearable technology into something that fits on a finger.
Simple questions like where am I? Hard to answer without GIS enhanced GPS units to give your latitude longitude data if you can make sense of that, usually via Google Maps on your smartphone, where it will load a color interactive map with POI's on the touchscreen & put a little animation graphic where you are located on the map. You can then thumb type in a new address & hit go & it will compute the best route * give you turn by turn instruction with a digital voice assistant talking you through the new route; using wifi & LTE or mobile data along with GPS & GLONASS & BAIDOO signals to hone in our your exact location to within about 10 ft of precision. Military versions can locate things down to 5 mm or smaller using an encrypted signal the consumer devices cannot make use of.
New ways to enable localization using topographical features someone walking across or driving across inside a vehicle, using an asset library of information along with the inertial 3X mem's sensor data from in your existing smartphone. Inertial navigation mixed with dead reckoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning enables GPS-less or non satellite based location service or localization, figuring out where you are on Earth! See this link for more https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3085575 // specifically from wikipedia // https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system
NS's contain Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) which have angular and linear accelerometers (for changes in position); some IMUs include a gyroscopic element (for maintaining an absolute angular reference). Angular accelerometers measure how the vehicle is rotating in space. Generally, there is at least one sensor for each of the three axes: pitch (nose up and down), yaw (nose left and right) and roll (clockwise or counter-clockwise from the cockpit). Linear accelerometers measure non-gravitational accelerations of the vehicle. Since it can move in three axes (up & down, left & right, forward & back), there is a linear accelerometer for each axis.
A computer continually calculates the vehicle's current position. First, for each of the six degrees of freedom (x,y,z and θx, θyand θz), it integrates over time the sensed acceleration, together with an estimate of gravity, to calculate the current velocity. Then it integrates the velocity to calculate the current position.
Inertial guidance is difficult without computers. The desire to use inertial guidance in the Minuteman missile and Project Apollo drove early attempts to miniaturize computers. Inertial guidance systems are now usually combined with satellite navigation systems through a digital filtering system. The inertial system provides short term data, while the satellite system corrects accumulated errors of the inertial system. An inertial guidance system that will operate near the surface of the earth must incorporate Schuler tuning so that its platform will continue pointing towards the center of the earth as a vehicle moves from place to place.
Neoclassical throwback tech includes automatic self winding mechanical wrist watches the sell from $50-$5million depending on the movement, complications, materials, & especially branding, eg. Rolex for example! I happen to be a fan of Seiko 5 automatics, though I also have a Chinese STUHRLING original skeletonized model & BODERRY titanium sapphire automatic. A collection of newer Citizen Eco-drive solar battery electric quartz watches & some glitzy analog primary battery quartz watches. I have a cheap digital sports watch by CASIO & a similar nicer older Tough Solar Wav Ceptor. I have a thin titanium Skagen quartz model that Meg really likes, though its silver oxide battery no longer working. The press fit back of that Skagen a turd to remove & install during the battery change.
Actually battery changes in wrist watches what drove my interest in Eco-drive by Citizen & solar electric watches from CASIO. My iPhone SE drove the purchased of my first Apple Watch Series 2, while the Series 5 Apple Watch was just an upgrade that I gave to Meg when she got me an Apple Watch SE as a gift. Going even further back in time, Meg & I both had many generations of Fitbit's, but have long since moved beyond their sealed failing batteries & strange clip on charging cables. If there is one thing I dislike about LIPO powered fitness trackers & smart watches & bluetooth ear buds & similar, the sealed non user replaceable batteries that fade after a few years & brick said device into a small bit of e-waste, rarely recycled properly. Like setting your money on fire, at least these self winding spring driven automatics I collect can sit in a drawer for years, then be wound up by movement on the wrist or hand wound in the newer movements with said feature & hacking~
In a world of 8-10 speed automatic cars, a 6 speed manual gearbox seems like a throwback. The words "Future" & "Primitive" go together. For a time I thought cheap quartz watches were lame, but the first Quartz wrist watches in the 1960's were modern marvels in their own right. Today something as mundane as a Garmin GPS unit for your car is a modern marvel of electronics, mapping & navigation.
A whole range of GPS enhanced smartwatches are sold by Garmin today, though I find them interesting, I really like the way our Apple Watch's play nice with our iPhones. Meg & both have our OG iPhone SE's & they still work. I kept the oldest Apple Watch too, it sits in a drawer, kept partially charged, without even a band attached to wear it. A functional antique as it ages, on its second generation battery that I replaced with a hair dryer, razor blade & parts & tools from https://www.ifixit.com
I am a device repair enthusiast, device repair activist & professional certified device repair technician. I also really like DIY & that idea of the maverick spirit of making it happen deliberately, trying, failing, learning from your failure, trying again using what you learned to do better & even if you fail again, trying again until you get it right. I even aspire to do things as good as I can on the first try. I call this "first try highly effective or FTHE or Single Pass Excellence SPE. I usually study online, recursively, before tying to do anything new, so I already know what I am up against & the basics, so I can hit it like pro as much as possible on the first go // not competitive, but in a way aiming towards greater excellence in the ways I operate as a person!
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