An E-Ink Progress Bar For Your Unborn Child

Having a child is a major milestone in a person’s life, and there’s a long list of things to get done before that little bundle of joy kicks and screams its way into the world. What better way to make sure you’ve still got time to paint the nursery and assemble the crib than to have an automated loading screen that shows just how far along the organic 3D printing process is?

This fetal development tracker was put together by [mokas] using Adafruit’s ESP32-S2 powered MagTag. As the name implies, the all-in-one electronic ink development board is designed so that it can be adhered to a metallic surface with integrated magnets. The idea is that you can pop a battery in the low-power device, stick it on your refrigerator, and have a regularly updated display of…well, whatever you want.

In this case, [mokas] has combined a CircuitPython routine for displaying a progress bar with some example code that works its way through a slideshow of bitmaps. The fetal development images were pulled from Wikimedia, and a one-line ImageMagick incantation got them properly dithered for display on the e-ink panel.

With this project out of the way, no doubt [mokas] will soon start work on the next parenthood hack. Perhaps  some variant of this computer vision system that can detect when a sleeping baby is getting hungry.

12 thoughts on “An E-Ink Progress Bar For Your Unborn Child

  1. This might look interesting if you don’t have kids or if this is your first pregnancy.

    As someone with several kids, I don’t recommend you do this. It doesn’t always work out and reminders can be… a lot, emotionally.

    1. Well said. Looks like a fun project but potential makers should definitely check with their partner to be sure both people are emotionally prepared for the worst outcome. Even then I would warn against it.

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