Casio Watch Face
Retro Casio CA-53W calculator watch face pixel-crafted for the Amazfit Bip's 8-color 176x176 transflective display.
- ›Replacing black in the 8-color indexed palette with LCD olive-green prevents edge artifacts under black pixel digits.
- ›Omitting seconds updates preserves the Amazfit Bip's 30+ day battery life.
- ›Manual pixel dithering stretches an 8-color transflective display surprisingly far.
When it comes to smartwatches and fitness trackers, the Amazfit Bip is my flavor of choice. It’s cheap, replaceable, lasts 30+ days on a charge, and fulfills my needs for glancing at notifications and sleep/health tracking.
My all-time favorite wristwatch was the Casio CA-53W-1. Ever since I watched Back to the Future as a kid, I had to have that retro timepiece on my wrist.
The 8-Color Palette Trick
The Bip supports a whopping 8 colors on its transflective memory-in-pixel display (9 if you count transparent pixels): White, Yellow, Fuchsia, Red, Cyan, Green, Blue, and Black. You can do a lot with those 8 colors using dithering and color indexing in Photoshop (Image > Mode > Indexed Color > Uniform).
Pixel Art & Sprite Packing
The challenge was resizing and pixelizing the face to fit the tiny 176x176 screen. Using photos of my own Casio, I scaled it to the square form factor and manually edited the pixel grid. For the calculator buttons, a hand-dithered pattern read much cleaner than downsampling a photo.
The “LCD screen” window was my favorite trick: I baked the signature yellowish-green LCD dither directly into the background image so the overlaid black digits and status icons wouldn’t suffer from palette collisions.
Features & Layout
I kept the time and date true to the original CA-53W, removed the seconds readout (since refreshing every second kills battery life), and packed the surrounding regions with Bip telemetry: battery level, alarm status, screen lock, step goal completion, DND mode, Bluetooth status, and current weather/temperature.
The finished watch face is available as a free download on Amazfit WatchFaces.