Back to Future Flux Capacitor

Pop the hood on the most famous car ever built.

This isn't a picture of a dashboard. It's the inside of one — a circuit board, wired and soldered, with the flux capacitor fluxing away in the middle of it. It runs, all day, on your wrist.

THE CAPACITOR ACTUALLY RUNS

Three coils, one Y, and eight seconds of real footage cut down to a six-second loop that plays four times a second whenever you're looking at it. It charges, it flares, it goes dark, it builds back up. Not a still. Not a two-frame blink. The thing you came for, doing what it does.

FOUR READINGS, FOUR INSTRUMENTS

THE CLOCK — the time circuits' own four-digit module, bolted to the top of the board, HOLD TO 88 plate and all. Orange segments over the faint ghosts of the ones that aren't lit.

THE DATE — the day and the date, in green, in the recess on the left.

THE STEPS — your count and the word for it, in amber, in the recess on the right. Your goal fills a ring round the rim as you walk it.

THE PLUTONIUM GAUGE — your battery, on the DeLorean's own dial, with a red needle that sweeps from E to F. Drop to a tenth and the EMPTY lamp lights, exactly as it should.

THE DETAIL YOU FEEL BEFORE YOU SEE IT

Behind every lit digit sits the faint ghost of the segments that aren't lit — the same shadow that lives on real hardware, and the reason this reads as a genuine display rather than a font pretending to be one.

Every bar is cut at an angle at both ends, leaving the wedge-shaped gaps a real seven-segment display has at the corners of every digit. The cells were measured off the board itself, not eyeballed, so the lit numbers land exactly where the unlit ones are painted — to the pixel.

The needle was measured the same way. It turns on the centre of the tick arc, not near it, and it reaches the ticks and stops.

It's the kind of thing you shouldn't notice — and can't stop noticing once you have.

IT SLEEPS LIKE THE OTHER ONE

Let it go quiet and the board goes with it. What's left is the time circuits' own always-on: the hour and the minute in a dim green, drifting very slightly so your display stays healthy for the long run, with the flux capacitor and the hoverboard taking turns underneath. Raise your wrist and the whole board lights up again.

On an OLED screen that black is real black — those pixels are switched off rather than painted, which is easier on the battery as well as on the eye in a dark room.

MADE FOR YOUR WATCH, NOT JUST ANY WATCH

Every instrument is drawn to your screen's own size, so the digits are crisp on a small watch and on a large one alike. Whichever you wear, it looks like it was cut for it.

ONE PURCHASE. THAT'S ALL.

No ads. No subscription. No account. No upsell six months from now.

YOUR DATA NEVER LEAVES YOUR WATCH

Your steps, your goal and your battery are read on the watch and shown on the watch. Nothing is collected, nothing is stored, and nothing is sent anywhere — there's no server to send it to.

NOTHING ELSE TO SET UP

No account, no pairing, no screens to work through. Install it, choose it, and the capacitor starts fluxing. It follows your watch's own 12- or 24-hour setting automatically.

REQUIRES

Wear OS 5 or later.

One point twenty-one gigawatts not included.

An unofficial fan-made tribute. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any film studio or rights holder.