The Competition
Competed in PhysTech 2026 by building and submitting a hardware watch using Arduino — my first embedded systems project. The competition never announced placement results.
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About
What it is: PhysTech is a competition combining physics and technology challenges. My entry is a hardware watch built with Arduino — a first dive into embedded systems and physical computing after working exclusively in software.
What I built: A functional wristwatch on an ESP32-C3 SuperMini, with the firmware written in C/C++ against the Arduino framework. An SSD1306 OLED, an MPU6050 accelerometer and a MAX30102 heart-rate sensor all share one I2C bus. It counted steps and beats on-device across five screens, set its clock over NTP, paired to a phone hotspot through a self-hosted portal, and uploaded finished workouts — average and peak heart rate, distance, calories, step count — to a backend every five minutes. None of it was anything I'd done before.
What I learned: Embedded C/C++ on the Arduino framework, wiring and breadboarding, reading datasheets, and sharing one I2C bus between three devices without them fighting over it — plus how embedded loops and polling differ from the event-driven and server-driven code I'm used to.
Why this project: Every prior project has been pure software. Building something physical that you can wear is a different kind of challenge — and the constraint of working with hardware instead of just redeploying code made the problem-solving more interesting.
Progress
Status
Finished and submitted the hardware watch build. The competition never announced placement results.
Tech Stack
ESP32-C3 SuperMini programmed with the Arduino framework (C/C++), a shared I2C bus carrying an SSD1306 OLED, an MPU6050 accelerometer and a MAX30102 heart-rate sensor, NTP timekeeping over Wi-Fi, and breadboard wiring — all new territory coming from a software-only background.
New Skills
Embedded C/C++, reading hardware datasheets, I2C bus addressing and clock speeds, sensor polling loops, and the fundamentals of wiring physical components.
Goal
Shipped a working wristwatch and submitted it for competitive placement — building a hardware foundation that has no equivalent in any prior project. No placement results were ever announced; the build itself is the outcome, and it went on to become the FitnessAI Watch.
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