Enthusiast turns Wear OS watch into gear knob with display

If there’s one thing that car lovers and DIY enthusiasts agree on, it’s that there’s no better feeling than actually getting under the hood (no joke intended), making changes, and figuring things out. And when you bring those two things together, you get something like this, a totally wild and impressive project that combines cars with DIY chops, a love of 3D printing, and repurposing old gear.

Created by Desmonte, a DIY enthusiast, this project merges the TicWatch Pro 3’s display and motherboard with a 3D-printed gear knob to create something absolutely wild (via Tom’s Hardware).

It’s a fully functioning gear display that sits directly on your gear lever. They vibe-coded a Wear OS watch app to run the algorithms and do all the calculations, and so the watch displays gear information based on accelerometer and gyroscope readings. This way, the watch can report its angle and display the gear number accordingly.

Desmonte pointed out in discussions that it often shows incorrect gear data when driving on hills. However, he was able to fine-tune the algorithm to fix the problem.

The tinkerer already has a bunch of ideas for another version of the device. Based on suggestions from people who answered on their Reddit PostHe plans to use stronger printing materials like SLS for the next version. He is also considering adding a second sensor to the car to get reference data and calculate the correct angle even when driving on slopes.

Before you think the exact thing we all thought – who also looks at their gear lever while driving – this device also works as a media controller. You can use swipe gestures to change or pause tracks in Spotify.

Ultimately, this might just be a cool gimmick for a car, but it shows what can be done with an old smartwatch and 3D printing. Vibe coding makes it easy to create apps for just about anything you want to do, and with 3D printing, you can put your old smartwatch to use in unique (and maybe a little weird) places.