I was recently cleaning up and happened upon my old Seiko RC-1000. The battery had long since expired, but a new battery (BR 2032) brought it back from the dead (press the 4 gray buttons at the same time will boot it up).
I dug some more and found the connection cable which could be used to program?, well send notes, to the RC-1000. The cable would connect to the user-port on a commodore 64, which I no longer owned. In vain I searched eBay, but my chances were slim to find a PC compatible adapter.
I figured the tech could not be that complex so decided to find out if it was possible to make the RC-1000 usable again in 2023.
Requirements
Raspberry PI
Prolific USB Serial Cable
Seiko RC-1000
Bits of cable
GotYa!
Seiko Engineers were ahead of their time when creating the RC-1000, but for some reason or other, came to the conclusion that the world would end in 2020. Using a RC-1000 in 2023 is slightly hampered by the fact the date range of the watch spans 1980 until 2020. Setting of the correct calendar will require a bit of maths. For 2023 you will need to set the year to 2017 or 2006. A handy calculator can be found here.
Batteries. Look out, be sure to use Panasonic BR 2032 batteries. The CR 2032 batteries are slightly bigger, you might get them in the watch, but getting them back out is near impossible. Tip. I managed to remove these snuggly fitted CR batteries using some superglue and an old AA battery to vertically pull the battery out. Be careful.
Software
The original software was a Basic program which only runs in MSDOS and is very hard to find. I have created a command line JavaScript application for managing your RC-1000 / RC-4000 available over on github.
