Fancy transforming your ageing Casio into a smartwatch? Ollee has the answer

Casio’s timepieces occupy a strange, liminal space between futuristic and retro. Casio was once at the very cutting edge of digital watchmaking and recently celebrated half a century since the 1974 Casiotron started it all. Even today, the Japanese company retains a roster of long-lived designs that are both timeless and instantly evocative of a particular era, whether it’s the 70s craze for arcade games or the style of the 1980s.

But can old technology be made smarter? That’s the core ambition of the Ollee Watch project, a unique development kit that aims to transform the humble Casio into a modern, multi-functional device without losing any of its classic aesthetics. Designed for several key models, including the F-91W and A158W (both from 1989), the project has been in development for the past 18 months by a long-term fan of the brand, Gregor Simeonov.

The Ollee watch is sold as a kit, a simple replacement circuit board and optional NFC tag (Near-Field Communication ) that can be installed in a watch in a matter of minutes. ‘Everything was done in-house – from the hardware design to all of the firmware running on the watch module itself,’ says Simeonov, an electric engineer. That firmware includes the kind of functionality that was simply inconceivable back in the late 80s, including fitness and activity tracking.

It's not as if Casio has ever scrimped on technical accomplishment – the VDB-200 model had a touchscreen interface way back in 1997, whilst generations of 80s and 90s schoolchildren were in thrall to the C-80 calculator watch from 1980, or the CD-40 Databank watch from 1983.

Simeonov describes the original A158W as ‘an amazing time piece - the combination of aesthetics, functionality, build quality and no hassle battery life, all at a reasonable price… [It’s] a quiet engineering marvel in my opinion and the embodiment of “less is more”.’

The new module allows the Casio to be paired with a dedicated smartphone app (available on both Android and iOS), using the original LCD screen to display a variety of new information and functions, ranging from world time, timers and alarms and even a step counter. If you install it into one of the black resin-bodied watches, you can also use the NFC tag to trigger programmed actions.

‘The hardware itself took four iterations to get right,’ Simeonov explains, ‘Once the bugs were knocked out in the first version, the following revisions were more to experiment with feature sets - for example one version had a working compass, while another version had double RGB LEDs - neither of these variants made it to production.’

Although this kind of kit-based electronics project is aimed at perennial tech tinkerers, it serves as a welcome reminder that with the right motivation, old school electronics can have an even longer lifespan than first envisaged.

For more information visit OlleeWatch.com, @OlleeWatch