Disqo

Disqo

A wearable synthesizer — a smartwatch with three buttons, a high-resolution magnetic scroll wheel and a circular LCD display, designed for building a synth you can run on your wrist.

Hardware

Disqo is built around a custom PCB designed in KiCad.

The PCB files, schematic, BOM and 3D models live in the pcb/ directory. An interactive HTML BOM is available at pcb/bom/ibom.html.

Firmware

The firmware runs on MicroPython with a patched gc9a01_mpy C module compiled in for fast display drawing.

Structure

firmware/
├── main.py              # Entry point — launches the watchface
├── boot.py              # MicroPython boot stub
├── apps/                # Applications (clock, main menu)
├── gui/                 # UI framework (menus, themes, text layout)
├── system/              # Hardware abstraction layer (HAL)
├── utils/               # Encoder math, datetime formatting, font helpers
├── fonts/               # Bitmap and TTF font definitions
├── scripts/             # Build, deploy and helper scripts
├── patches/             # Patches for gc9a01_mpy and MicroPython ESP32 port
└── typings/             # MicroPython type stubs for IDE support

Watchface

The current primary watchface features:

• DSEG7-style digital clock with "ghost" segments
• Greeting text that changes by time of day (Good morning / afternoon / evening)
• Battery icon with voltage display
• Date with day-of-week
• Double-buffered rendering with a textured background

Controls

• Rotary encoder (scroll wheel): Scrolls through menus and adjusts values
• Button 1 (B1): Wake from deep sleep; back/cancel in menus
• Button 3 (B3): Open main menu; select in menus
• B1 + B3 combo: Enter deep sleep

Apps

• Clock — Date, time, battery status, encoder angle
• Main Menu — Scrollable menu with items: date/time, alarm, theme, brightness, metronome, drone (sub-apps are still planned)

Building & Deploying

Prerequisites

• MicroPython source
• ESP-IDF toolchain
• esptool and mpremote

Compile MicroPython

The build script compiles MicroPython for the GENERIC_SPIRAM board with the patched gc9a01_mpy module:

cd firmware/scripts
./compile-micropython.sh

Patches are applied before building:

• gc9a01_mpy.patch — Faster display init, adds draw_len for text measurement
• micropython-ports-esp32.patch — Configures 80 MHz flash/SPIRAM, external RTC crystal, faster deep sleep wake

Deploy code to device

cd firmware/scripts
./copy-code.sh

This uses mpremote to copy the Python source files to the device and syncs the RTC to the host clock.

Set time

cd firmware/scripts
./set-time.sh

Future Plans

• Audio synthesis: Wrap pwm_audio for better piezo output, classic Bluetooth audio, digital audio synthesis libraries
• Sub-apps: Date/time setting, alarm, theme selector, brightness control, metronome, drone
• Smarter input polling and debouncing
• Theme persistence in non-volatile memory