For busy people, keeping track of all the tasks on your to-do list can be a daunting task in itself. Luckily there’s software to help you keep organized, but it’s always nice to have a physical artifact as well. Inspired by some beautiful nixie clock designs, [Bertrand Fan] decided to build a nixie indicator that tells him how many open items are on his to-do list, giving a shot of instant gratification as it counts down with each finished task.
The task-management part of this project is a on-line tool called Todoist. This program comes with a useful Web API that allows you to connect it your own software projects and exchange data. [Bert] wrote some code to extract the number of outstanding tasks from his to-do list and send it to an ESP8266 D1 Mini that drives the nixie tube. Mindful of the security implications of letting such a device connect directly to the internet, he set up a Mac Mini to act as a gateway, connecting to the ESP8266 through WiFi and to the Todoist servers through a VPN.
The little ESP board is sitting in a 3D-printed case, together with the nixie driver circuits and a socket to hold the tube. A ceramic tile glued to the front gives it a bit more of a sturdy, luxury feel to match the shiny glass and metal display device. The limitations of the nixie tube restrict the number of tasks indicated to nine, but we imagine this might actually be useful to help prevent [Bert] from overloading himself with too many tasks. After all, what’s the point of having this device if you can’t reach that satisfying “zero” at the end of the day?
Although nowadays nixie tubes are mostly associated with fancy clocks, we’ve seen them used in a variety of other uses, such as keeping track of 3D-printer filament, adding a display to a 1940s radio, or simply displaying nothing useful at all.
It would be difficult to build one suitable for my life, for every task I would remove, the count would increase by two or three.
B^)
Then yiu use an up/down counter.
I’d definitely need two digits.
I was thinking how lucky this guy was – to only ever have 9 tasks queued up in his to-do list.
Task 10: implement second Nixie tube.
Add a neon lamp, and you could extend it to 19, 20 if you start from zero.
B^)
Well, coincidentally I have been eyeing up some IV-27 VFD tubes. 13 seven-seg characters should be enough handle my use case
Ooooh check out the fancy pants whose life is in enough order they can have a single-digit task counter.
Last time a single digit would have worked for me, the list would have been
* Empty the dishwasher
* Walk the dog
* Do homework
* Tidy up my room
* Brush teeth
.. i.e., that was a while ago
Perhaps it’s one digit because the hand made nixie tube being used is roughly $150 US dollars? Surely worth it – check out the web site and blog for the epic journey that led to these tubes. PS – they are large!
https://www.daliborfarny.com/