When you think about it, time is all we’ve really got. Where to go from there is ultimately up to you. Maybe you use an app to track every task, or just go with the onboard timer. But that can be a lot of steps to begin with, and then the phone screen goes dark again. For some people, the whole out of sight, out of mind thing will kick in. At worst, you get distracted, start doing something else, and then feel guilty and frustrated when the timer starts going off.
But there’s hope for us visual simpletons, and the purveyor of that hope is [Edris] of Ponderly Robotics. You see, [Edris] created an extremely easy-to-use timer that looks like something you’d find on Captain Picard’s desk as a token of defeating the Borg. But the affably-named FlipBuddy is far more useful than that description implies.
[Edris] uses the open-source FlipBuddy every day, and swears by its simplicity. The point is accessibility, and respect for privacy. That said, there’s a companion app to provide insight.
Basically, you assign a task to each cube face. Choose one, and place the cube with that side facing up. FlipBuddy wakes up, connects to WiFi, and then pushes your session to the cloud, bypassing the need for your phone.
Time to switch tasks? Just put the new side face up. When you’re done for the day, use the stop face, which we’re hoping means to set it on the knocked-off corner.
You don’t need much to make FlipBuddy come to life. [Edris] used an ESP32 (an S3 SuperMini or similar will work), an MPU6050, six WS2812B LEDs, and a 3.7 V Li-Po cell. The beautiful, 3D printed origami mesh enclosure prints as a single, flat piece, and you get to fold it up around the internals and make your new buddy come to life.
Part of the point of FlipBuddy is that it can become as intuitive as punching a chess clock. So if it’s buttons you’re after, check out this simple Pomodoro timer.
this is the second story in two days that has a step where i just cannot fathom the verb at the core of it. “pushes your session to the cloud.” ??? i clicked around a little bit and it seems like it simply means “tells the app’s website which face is up” ?
i really struggle to understand the point of this thing. and not because i doubt the value of timers, but because the thing is very poorly explained from my perspective. it’s called a “timer”, and the HaD write up refers to “timer starts going off”, which matches my expectations from the word “timer” — an alarm that sounds after some pre-determined interval. but the project’s page seems to describe a device that is (just?) an event logger. it logs the time when the cube is flipped. for producing a timesheet for billables?
one thing i am starting to understand is that people who use LLMs a lot have a significantly different culture than i do. forget the generation gap, there’s a whole new kind of gap. they have different needs and different ways of communicating about those needs? it’s kind of surprising to me because i thought the product that the human is supposed to create these days is a brief description of the goal — “prompts” — and these words seem to spray the vicinity around the goal without ever hitting it. nudge nudge, time mumble mumble, wink wink.