[Becky Stern] has created the mindfulness bracelet, a wearable which looks great and serves an important purpose. The bracelet buzzes every hour to remind you to stand up and take a break from work, soldering, gaming, or whatever it is you may be doing. The bracelet is made up of interlinked figure 8 shapes of leather, though [Becky] says rubber from a bicycle inner tube works great as well. The final shape reminds us of the link belts sometimes found on lathes or other industrial equipment. The links are the perfect size to slip an Arduino Gemma in, along with a battery and vibrating motor. A NPN transistor, diode, and resistor round out the entire bill of materials for this design. This bracelet is a heck of a lot cheaper than the Apple watch feature which inspired it!
The time interval is set in the code to 1 hour, and can be adjusted by the user. Although the times are stored in milliseconds, the design does use the ATtiny85’s Watchdog Timer (WDT) to conserve power. This means the time can drift up to 30 seconds per hour, which is fine in this application.
Click past the break to see the bracelet in action!
Cool design.
I am trying to get the same “get up and walk” effect, but with an actual sensor that knows you are sitting:
https://hackaday.io/project/5983-situp
Interesting, I got the same concept and project in Mind:
https://hackaday.io/project/5656-move-your-butt
Haha, great. you want to force the user off the chair, nice!
Reminds me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ-l5PlDa-k
If your workplace chains you to a chair, it needs some flexibility so this won’t happen. I will always see these timer gadgets in the light of that clock hand turner from Metropolis.
One drop of water and it’s dead.
That’s because a lot of people never go to the finished product phase of a project. No conformal coating, heck even a spray polyurethane would do. no case with protective seals.
This project is a perfect one for the TI MSP430 watch they used to sell. Problem is there are no libraries at all that are useable for that watch so you have to write everything from scratch including the hardware libraries.
Love the idea of wearable tech, and when you’re working at a desk for 8 hours a day, this could be a life saver, I may need to make one of these.
Might it be better to have this on the chair? The chair could at least tell when you’re sitting down and for how long, resetting the timer when you sit down.
That is what I am trying to do, see my project.
This bracelet is a fashion thing, only vibrates every hour.
A $10 digital watch in timer mode can do that without looking like a mad scientist or mistaken as a terrorist in public.
My cigarette addiction accomplishes the same thing, in a far more dangerous, and expensive way…