Over the years, I’ve become habituated to working in a Pomodoro style - make the day a series of tasks worked on in short blocks of time, with regular breaks. But I’ve never actually used a timer - just relied on my internal clock to work in roughly 1 hour increments.
As I was building the Boldport 3x7, it started to appeal to me as a very nice display to use for a non-distracting Pomodoro timer.
After breadboarding the idea my first thought was to make a PCB … but as there’s been a bit of Mohit Bhoite fandom in the Boldport Club recently, I was drawn into a another copper-wire sculpture. Not very ruggedized, but it does look interesting!
Now for the true test - is it actually useful? Well, I’ve started using it for real and so far so good.
Note: the two left-most digits are minutes, the last digit is tenths of minutes. This is actually why I built my 3x7 with the yellow digit on the right;-)
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub
Here’s a demonstration of a 5 minute countdown. Yes, that’s 5 minutes of your life that is non-refundable!