Fake motivational plant squirts you in the wherever.

Focus Flower Motivates By Squirting Water In Your Face

November 4, 2021 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

When you need to get some tasks done and are short on attention, it’s hard to beat a timer. But whenever you do, it feels pretty darn good. The problem is that when you don’t finish in time, what’s the punishment? There are no consequences baked into the Pomodoro Technique other than good ol’ guilt. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a bit of negative reinforcement involved?

[Hardware Unknown]’s Focus Flower never needs watering, at least not in the normal horticultural way. You will have to fill a reservoir, because this flower provides liquid motivation. No, it’s not a spirit spritzer, though we suppose you could turn it into an avant-garde vodka fountain when the novelty of water wears off, making this Pomodoro with a twist into more of a Bloody Mary. It’s a natural next step, especially if you were already into the hot sauce idea.

Operation Focus Flower is simple: just push the easy button to start the task timer, and the Arduino Nano attached will begin a countdown. Push the button again when you’re done, but if you don’t do it before the countdown is over, the plant squirts you with a steady, skin-blasting stream of water from a solenoid-driven flosser tip. An air compressor nearby is required, which blows the minimalist vibe a bit, but you could always stow that part underneath your desk.

The Focus Flower sure looks to be effective at the whole negative reinforcement thing. And it doesn’t leave you totally clueless — there’s a ring of LEDs around the base that show how much time is left. Whenever you do successfully hit the button in time, it will say ‘that was easy’ in one of 12 languages, hence all the flags. Do not miss the totally free infomercial below.

Maybe you want a more friendly way to manage your time — we understand. Meet the Pomodachi productivity pet.

Continue reading “Focus Flower Motivates By Squirting Water In Your Face” →

Malamud’s General Index: Research Gist, No Slap On The Wrist

November 2, 2021 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

Tired of that unsettling feeling you get from looking for paywalled papers on that one site that shall not be named? Yeah, us too. But now there’s an alternative that should feel a little less illegal: this new index of the world’s research papers over on the Internet Archive.

It’s an index of words and short phrases (up to five words) culled from approximately 107 million research papers. The point is to make it easier for scientists to gain insights from papers that they might not otherwise have access to. The Index will also make it easier for computerized analysis of the world’s research. Call it a gist machine.

Technologist Carl Malamud created this index, which doesn’t contain the full text of any paper. Some of the researchers with early access to the Index said that it is quite helpful for text mining. The only real barrier to entry is that there is no web search portal for it — you have to download 5TB of compressed files and roll your own program. In addition to sentence fragments, the files contain 20 billion keywords and tables with the papers’ titles, authors, and DOI numbers which will help users locate the full paper if necessary.

Nature’s write-up makes a salient point: how could Malamud have made this index without access to all of those papers, paywalled and otherwise? Malamud admits that he had to get copies of all 107 million articles in order to build the thing, and that they are safe inside an undisclosed location somewhere in the US. And he released the files under Public Resource, a non-profit he founded in Sebastopol, CA. But we have to wonder how different this really is from say, the Google Books N-Gram Viewer, or Google Scholar. Is the difference that Google is big enough to say they’re big enough get away with it?

If this whole thing reminds you of another defender of free information, remember that you can (and should) remove the DRM from his e-book of collected writings.

Via r/technology

Tiny pomodoro timer starts as soon as you plug it in.

Cherry Pomodoro Timer Forces You To Follow

October 31, 2021 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

If you have trouble staying focused and getting work done, the Pomodoro Technique of working in 25-minute intervals with 5-minute breaks is pretty hard to beat. The only problem is that it requires a lot of input from the user, and all that timer-setting can get in the way of actually getting down to business. The absolute worst is when you find yourself working hard, but see that forgot to set the damn timer (ask us how we know). In essence, the tomato itself can only do so much — you have to actually use it and honor the timer, put in the work, and believe in the system.

But what if you didn’t have to do as much? With [Erfan Sn]’s design, all you have to do is plug it in to a USB port and the countdown starts automatically. Not only does this Pomodoro timer force you to get with the program, it also makes you take breaks from the screen by putting the computer into sleep mode when the 25 minutes (or whatever time you set in the software) are up. This thing even keeps track of your Pomodoro count.

At the heart of this build is the Digispark ATtiny85 dev board, which has a handy onboard USB plug. It can be built with or without the OLED screen, which is good if you are easily distracted by the timer itself. This cherry tomato only costs about $10 to make, it’s tiny, and you can take it anywhere.

As you will see in the gifs on GitHub, [Erfan Sn] has it plugged into a female USB-A to male USB-C, which is probably better for the computer long-term, what with all the plugging and unplugging. When we make ours, we’ll probably plug it into a hub that has power switches for each port.

If all of this sounds like too much work, check out this build that senses whether or not you’re in the chair.

Pomodoro timer helps you focus on tasks without burning out.

World’s Cutest Pomodoro Timer Is Also A Clock

October 29, 2021 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Student and hacker [prusteen] recently fell in love with the Pomodoro method of time management. That’s where you concentrate on your task for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break, and repeat this four times with a longer break at the end. Initially, [prusteen] was keeping track on their phone, but hated having to change the timer value between Pomodoros and break times. In order to keep the flow mode engaged, [prusteen] came up with this darling little study buddy that does it all with the push of a button.

By default, this tomato shows the current time, which we think is a handy and often-overlooked feature of Pomodoro timer builds. Press that momentary switch on the front, and it starts counting upward to 25 minutes. Then it beeps in stereo through a pair of buzzers when the time is up, and automatically starts a five-minute break timer. Press it again and the display goes back to clock mode, although judging by the code, doing this will cancel the timer.

Inside the juicy enclosure is an Arduino Nano, an RTC, and a 7-segment display. We love the attention to detail here, from the little green leaves on top to the anatomically-correct dimple on the underside. And we always like to see lids that snap on with magnets. So satisfying. Check out the brief demo after the break, which unfortunately does not include any lid-snapping action.

Do you need more interaction with your Pomodoro timer? Build yourself a pomo-dachi instead.

Continue reading “World’s Cutest Pomodoro Timer Is Also A Clock” →

Finally, an ortho split keyboard with two Enter keys.

All Aboard! The Railroad Keyboard Is Now Serving Open Sourceville

October 29, 2021 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it, and that goes for keyboard designs as much as it does the dessert cart. The Railroad is [DiplomacyPunIn10Did]’s first keyboard design, believe it or not. And, well, we like what we see. Good thing it’s open-source, eh?

While we personally don’t normally go for straight-up ortholinear keyboards, this one looks split enough to be comfortable. We love that there is both an ISO Enter and a regular-sized Return, although we might put another Enter on the left side if it were our keyboard. That’s the beauty of this whole open-source keyboard thing, though. I could assign any number of those animal-capped keys to Enter. Another plus is that The Railroad uses semi-normal keycap sets, with none of this 1.25u nonsense of certain split keyboards.

All the files and the BOM are available on GitHub under a Creative Commons license. This represents JLCPCB’s max length, by the way. [DiplomacyPunIn10Did] wanted to add a num pad, but it would have made it too long. Since the pictures are so big, we put our hands up to the screen to test it out. Those innermost 1u thumb keys look like they’re placed just far enough in toward the space bars that they wouldn’t cause strain, but it’s hard to know for sure without trying a real one. (Darn you, global shortages and shipping delays!)

Yep, there are all kinds of ways to make a keyboard your own. We’ve even seen an all-wood keyboard that uses Scrabble tiles for keycaps.

Really Robotic Robot Costume Will Probably Win The Contest

October 28, 2021 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Still don’t have anything to wear to that Halloween party this weekend? Or worse, your kid hasn’t decided on a costume that you both can agree on? Well, look no further than [Natasha Dzurny]’s Sally Servo the Really Robotic Robot Costume and accompanying multi-part build guide. You might want to start by raiding that recycle bin for cardboard, because you’re going to need a lot of it.

What you won’t need a lot of is hard-to-source parts, at least if you build it the [Natasha] and Brown Dog Gadgets way. Even so, there are a ton of cool moving and blinking bits and bobs to be made with servos, LEDs, and RGB LEDs connected up to something kid-friendly like the Micro:bit and the Brown Dog Gadgets Bit Board — that’s a base for the :bit that lets users connect components via LEGO and conductive tape.

Between Sally’s robotic googly eyes and her light-up belt, there are plenty of ideas here to steal and make your own, and each one is packaged in a great-looking guide complete with paper printing templates.

Our favorite part has to be the infinity mirror heart, which appears to be beating thanks to clever programming. That, and the costume details, like the waist-area wires running between the upper and lower pieces.

Is the party at your house? There’s probably still enough time to put together a projector-based stomping game for the driveway.

A tiny bedside clock that's packed with features.

ESP32 Clock Takes Time To Give Weather Info, Too

October 27, 2021 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

It’s fall in the northern hemisphere, so [Mike Rankin]’s kids are back in school and have returned to consulting him every morning about the weather and what they should wear. Since he’s no meteorologist, [Mike] built a beautifully dim and diminutive clock that does all the work for him, plus much more. It glows a lovely dark orange that’s perfect for the nightstand and those early morning interrogations.

In default mode, this clock displays the time, CO2 level, room temperature, and humidity in that eye-friendly orange. But wave your hand in front of the time of flight sensor, and it goes external, displaying the low and high temperatures for the day, plus the weather conditions forecast. After a few seconds of that, it goes back to default mode. The ESP fetches the time from an NTP server, then gets the weather from the OpenWeather API. The indoor weather comes from a combination sensor on the board.

Inside this tiny package is a beautifully-spun board with an ESP32 Pico D4 for a brain. In addition to the climate sensors there is a combination CO2/TVOC sensor (that’s total volatile organic compounds) to sniff out danger. There is also a pair of push buttons on the back and an ambient light sensor, but [Mike] isn’t using those just yet. Add in the Qwiic connector for future doo-dads, and you have quite the little gadget. Although the pictures make it look kind of big, you can see exactly how small it is in the demo video after the break.