When I was a kid I desperately wanted one of those spy-movie watches where the gadgets actually worked.
Radar, tracking, secret menus, weird little tools hidden on your wrist. The completely unnecessary stuff that feels extremely necessary when you’re twelve.
I’m nearly 30 now, had a Garmin on my wrist, and eventually thought: fine, I’ll build it myself.
So I started making ALPHA FIELDMASTER.
It now has a Bluetooth radar, a tailscan mode for checking which signals stay with you as you move, a seismic/vibration tool, GPS dead drop, signal intel, a fingerprint gate and a little Field System tying everything together.
But the side project took a weird turn.
I kept trying to design the interface through iterations with Claude Code: move this two pixels, make that ring thinner, nope, wrong spacing, again.
Eventually I realized I didn’t need a better prompt. I needed a better tool.
So I built my own browser-based watch editor where I could lay out the entire dial at pixel precision.
At first it was just a design/spec tool.
Then I discovered the real Garmin hardware still made parts of the design look cheap because of its rendering constraints. So we stopped asking the watch to recreate the design live.
The editor became the production renderer.
The dial, rings, seconds ticks, hand artwork and even the number glyphs now come directly from it.
The pixels on my wrist are literally the editor’s pixels.
And because everything came from one controlled recipe, the same system could be rendered at four screen sizes. We ported the app to 43 Garmin models in one night.
So the side project basically went:
childhood idea → Garmin app → frustration → custom design tool → that tool becomes the renderer → shipped product.
I’m a designer/creative more than an embedded developer, which is probably why this whole thing has been such a fun rabbit hole. Claude Code made it possible to keep crossing into the technical parts I normally wouldn’t have been able to handle alone.
Anyway, the ridiculous watch I wanted as a kid is actually on my wrist now.
Better late than never 😄
If you want to see the finished thing, it’s live on Garmin Connect IQ:
https://apps.garmin.com/nb-NO/apps/cc223e2c-a263-4dd4-802c-bf860c80be4d