If you’re anything like me, you’re familiar with the idea of Too-Many-Tabs™️. I see a cool thing, I open it in a tab, I might organize tabs, I might bookmark them, and see them now and then. The worst part about this for me is that as long as they’re not yet bookmarked and organized, I don’t want to close the tabs – so that I don’t “forget” about them. But, as long as I’ve not bookmarked/organized/blogged about something, it will feel like it is still using some level of brain bandwidth, running as a “background process” using a small, but non-zero, amount of brain attention. The only good ways I’ve found to excise these ideas/tabs/processes is for me to act on them (get started building and/or blog about them) or kill them (bookmark/organize).
I’ve seen several projects recently which are swirling around several similar concepts for me:
- Bitclock by @bradleysays which is a desktop e-ink / e-paper display connected to a few atmospheric sensors and ESP32 module to update the time. I found out about this project while looking at the 2024 OpenSauce lineup. It’s small, cute, and has a big friendly display.
- ESticky by @gokuxmaker which is a portable rechargeable battery powered e-ink “sticky note” e-ink display that can be updated over WiFi. I found out about this one from the Hackster.io Instagram page, which lead me to the Hacksterio and Instructibles write ups.
- Tymer by redditor @Critical-Nail-6252 which is a portable haptic feedback timer and an LED for basic feedback, crossposted to r/3Dprinting and r/functionalprint, with this being the most detailed of the writeups.
All of these projects do interestingly adjacent tasks – displaying relevant information, in an attractive way, serving as a reminder, good either on a desktop or perhaps a wearable. I could see making a version of Tymer as a wearable watch. The build seems fairly straightforward – buttons to input times, deep sleep functions which wake once a minute to determine if it needs to set off the vibration motor. I would love a small simple e-display such as the ESticky – to sit on my desktop, perhaps on/near/in front of my monitor. What’d I’d really like, of course, is something that’s kinda does some of each.
I ordered the parts for the ESticky, since the Tymer appears to basically require just a battery charging board (already integrated into the ESticky’s Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3) and a vibration motor (which I have a stack of already). I’ve not used a Seeed Studio product before, but it appears to be similar in formfactor and function to the Adafruit QtPy’s I’ve been using in various recent projects. Because I know I’m going to want to use one XIAO board as my dev board with headers and breadboard, one in the project itself, and one because… they’re cheap ($5) and there’s even odds I’ll blow one up.
My plan is to build a direct copy of the ESticky on a breadboard, add the vibration timer and buttons to manipulate it, see if I can do it in a more permanent format by soldering it together, then design / print a case.
I’ve never worked with a Seeed Studio product and not played with eink displays yet. Hopefully this will be fun!
Bonus: Now that I’ve purchased some of the parts, I can close dozens of tabs!
Sticky Note Timer