reminder

5 Articles

A fridge magnet with a display showing recycling reminders

Hackaday Prize 2022: BinPal Is A Convenient Recycling Reminder

June 11, 2022 by 14 Comments

While curbside pickup of recyclables is convenient, it does require you to keep track of which type of waste is picked up when: miss the biweekly paper pickup and you’ll soon find yourself stockpiling four weeks’ worth of boxes and newspapers. When [Dominic Buchstaller]’s stack of cardboard began to reach his ceiling, he decided to take action by building himself BinPal: a fridge magnet that helps you remember when to take out which bin.

At heart of the simple but effective BinPal is an ESP32 board that connects to Google Apps Script and retrieves the pickup schedule from Google Calendar. If one of four categories of waste is due for pickup, its icon is highlighted on an LCD screen. The user can press a touch-sensitive button to confirm the bin has been brought out for pickup; if that hasn’t been done by 8 pm, the display’s backlight starts flashing as an additional reminder.

The outer shell of the device is made from laser-cut plywood, with a few strong magnets glued inside to ensure the BinPal stays firmly attached to the fridge. In the true spirit of recycling, [Dominic] used only components that he had in his parts bin to make the BinPal. However, these parts are all easily available online, and with the full schematics and code available on the project’s Hackaday.io page it should be easy to adapt the design to different hardware platforms as well.

[Dominic]’s design was inspired by a flashing LED chore reminder we featured a few years ago. You can also make household task reminders by reusing a Kindle for its ePaper display.

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Break The Caps Lock Habit With This Annoying Buzzer

November 13, 2019 by 57 Comments

The much-maligned Caps Lock key has been causing problems for decades, and its continued existence is controversial enough that Google decided to drop it all together in their Chromebooks. Until the rest of the industry decides to follow their lead, they’ll likely be no shortage of awkward emails or overly aggressive comments that are the direct result of this treacherous key.

But [Glen Akins] thinks he has the solution. His creation is a tiny little USB notification device that has only one purpose: to make a terrible noise as long as the Caps Lock key is engaged. Think of it like the little indicator LED on your keyboard, but one that makes a terrible screeching noise that you simply can’t ignore. This is made possible by the fact that the Caps Lock status is handled at the OS level rather than the local input device.

The notifier is built around the PIC16F1459, as it allowed him to implement USB 2.0 while keeping the part count low. Beyond the PIC, the board uses a handful of passives and a transistor to drive the buzzer from a PWM signal. To avoid duplicated effort, everything was designed to fit inside the enclosure he already developed for his single-key keyboard that we covered last year. [Glen] and a fellow coworker from Keysight put together an excellent video on the creation and use of the buzzer that you can see after the break.

On the other end of the spectrum, and even smaller, is the “USB Capslocker” which is designed to weaponize this already troublesome feature of your keyboard.

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H2gO Keeps Us From Drying Out

July 28, 2018 by 19 Comments

The scientific community cannot always agree on how much water a person needs in a day, and since we are not Fremen, we should give it more thought than we do. For many people, remembering to take a sip now and then is all we need and the H2gO is built to remind [Angeliki Beyko] when to reach for the water bottle. A kitchen timer would probably get the job done, but we can assure you, that is not how we do things around here.

A cast silicone droplet lights up to show how much water you have drunk and pressing the center of the device means you have taken a drink. Under the hood, you find a twelve-node NeoPixel ring, a twelve millimeter momentary switch, and an Arduino Pro Mini holding it all together. A GitHub repo is linked in the article where you can find Arduino code, the droplet model, and links to all the parts. I do not think we will need a device to remind us when to use the bathroom after all this water.

Another intrepid hacker seeks to measure a person’s intake while another measures output.

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IoT Chore Reminder For The Serially Forgetful

March 10, 2018 by 6 Comments

The secret to domestic bliss often lies in attention to detail, an area in which we can all do a little better. But if paper notes and smartphone reminders are not enough to help you remember to knock jobs off your list, perhaps this IoT task reminder will give you the edge you need to keep the peace at home.

As [Andreas Spiess] points out, his best intentions of scheduling recurring tasks in Google Calendar were not enough to keep him on on top of his share of chores around the house. He found that the notifications popping up on his phone were far too easy to swipe away in favor of other distractions, so he set about building a real-world reminder. His solution uses a WeMOS D1 Mini in a bright blue 3D-printed box with from one to four LED switches on the front. Each box is linked to his Google Calendar, and when a task comes due, its light turns on. Sprinkled about the house near the task, like the laundry room or near the recycling, [Andreas] can’t help but see the reminder, which only goes out when he cancels it by pressing the task button. Simple but effective, and full of potential for other uses too.

Of course, the same thing could be accomplished with a Magic Mirror build, which we’ve seen a lot of over the years. But there’s something about the simplicity of these devices and their proximity to the task that makes sense — sort of like the Amazon Dash concept. We might build a few of these too.

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Kindle Weather And Recycling Display

April 1, 2013 by 17 Comments

kindle-weather-and-recycling-display

We’ve seen a fair number of hacks like this one that reuse a Kindle basically just for its ePaper display. [HaHaBird] has this device hanging on his refrigerator to display the weather and remind him about recycling day. It kind of make us wonder why we’re not seeing cheap ePaper modules on the hobby market?

The concept isn’t new, but [HaHaBird] does move it along just a little bit. He started by following the guide which [Matt] wrote after pulling off the original Kindle weather display hack. It uses a separate computer running a script that polls the Internet for weather data and generates a vector graphic like the one seen above. The Kindle then loads the image once every five minutes thanks to a cron job on the rooted device. But why stop there? [HaHaBird] tweaked the script to include a reminder about his municipality’s irregular recycling schedule.

Don’t overlook the quality of the hardware side of this hack. With its prominent place in the kitchen he wanted a nicely finished look. This was achieved by building a frame out of cherry and routing passages on the back to make room for the extension cable (so it could hang in landscape orientation) and a toggle to hold the Kindle firmly in place. Additional information on the build is available here.