phone addiction

3 Articles

The virtual pet showing a distressed face while a phone is in use

Anti-Doomscroll Tamagotchi Only Lives If You Do

September 8, 2026 by 15 Comments

The odds are, you have a device deliberately designed to be addictive in your pocket or on the table next to you if you aren’t staring at it right now– your smartphone. We’ve seen a number of projects that try and help people control or moderate their phone usage using a variety of techniques; this vitual pet by [brenpoly] does it by weaponizing human empathy, and our bizzare ability to pack-bond with literally anything.

The virtual pet itself is based on an ESP32 in a cutesy 3D-printed case, and we think it would probably work well enough if it just had hard-coded behaviors based on hooks in what you’re doing on your phone– the “my little buddy is sick because I’m doomscrolling” should be effective enough on its own, and that part is hardcoded on the ESP32 along with the regular virtual pet behaviour–but this is the year of our Llama 2026, so there has to be an LLM in there somewhere, right?

Some people would leave this part out, but we think [brenpoly]’s use of a local LLM on the phone does improve the project. The local agent doesn’t just have access to his screen time, but his notifications, too, and runs a whisper model linked to a microphone in the virtual pet via bluetooth. So you can get the contents or a summary of your notifications without looking at your phone, or just ask the little guy to tell you a joke. Giving the pet a voice with a the local piper model is also more effective at getting you to put your phone down when you hit the limits.

They’ve put the whole thing up on GitHub if you want to make your own– and if we can keep one person from strapping themselves to a shock collar, then this project is doing good in the world. If helps [brenpoly] or any of his fans do less scrolling and more hacking, that’s even better. Of course there’s a whole spectrum between “electrocute yourself” and “lovable virtual pet” when it comes to controlling your phone use, a spectrum that includes phone stands or even smart vaults for your device.

Thanks to [brenpoly] for the tip! Remember, all of your doomscrolling is justified if you find something to send to our tipsline. 

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Phone Stand Aims To Fight Addiction

June 28, 2026 by 1 Comment

Sometimes, it’s hard to stop picking up your phone every few minutes to check on notifications and scroll endlessly through the slop of the day. [PushpendraC2] has been working on a solution to this problem that would ideally discourage such behavior —  a nifty little smartphone stand!

The concept is straightforward enough—the smartphone stand uses a simple tactile button to determine if your smartphone is sitting on the little 3D printed shelf, or not. However, the smarts inside do a bit more than that, too. An ESP32-S3 is charged with monitoring whether the smartphone is sitting in place, and starts counting “focus time” while it’s there. If the phone is picked up, the OLED display on the shelf starts ticking down a 5-second timer to encourage you to put it back. If you don’t, the focus time is reset and you lose your streak.

It’s also possible to tap a touch sensor on the device which sets a reminder timer, prompting you to put your phone back after a set period of time, between 2 to 30 minutes. A buzzer will then start going off to prompt you to put the phone down. If you want to track the devices impact, you merely need to log in to the web server hosted by the ESP32, which shows your current focus session time, along with a heatmap of your daily productivity.

It’s a simple idea, but one that uses a few neat psychological hooks to encourage compliance and behavioral change. We’ve featured similar projects in this vein before, No surprise, as phone addiction is a problem experienced by many.

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IoT Safe Keeps Latchkey Kids’ Phones On Lockdown

September 21, 2019 by 12 Comments

Phones are pretty great. Used as telephones, they can save us from bad situations and let us communicate while roaming freely, for the most part. Used as computers, they often become time-sucking black holes that can twist our sense of self and reality. Assuming they pick up when you call, phones are arguably a good thing for kids to have, especially since you can hardly find a payphone these days. But how do you teach kids to use them responsibly, so they can still become functioning adults and move out someday? [Jaychouu] believes the answer is inside of a specialized lockbox.

This slick-looking box has a solenoid lock inside that can be unlocked via a keypad, or remotely via the OBLOQ IoT module. [Jaychouu] added a few features that drive it out of Arduino lockbox territory. To prevent latchkey children from cheating the system and putting rocks (or nothing at all) in the box, there’s a digital weight sensor and an ultrasonic sensor that validate the credentials of the contents and compare them with known values.

Want a basic lockbox to keep your phone out of reach while you work? Here’s one with a countdown timer.

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