One Kitchen Timer To Cook It All

When preparing food I have to keep track of multiple countdowns. Even though one could solve this by putting multiple cheap timers on the fridge door or use a smartphone app there are some benefits with an extra device.

• Efficient control when choosing the time (cheap timers normally just go up, higher settings are a pain, corrections after start are impossible)
• no need to clean all your fingers to change a timer
• Smartphones normally switch of the screen, so you can't see the current state (or they keep screen on and drain the smart phone battery for neaely nothing)
• Alsp the smartphones somtimes is needed to check recepies, problem solutions or communicating (yes really?). Again you cannot see the current state of the timers just by looking at the device

Features

• Track up to 4 timers (Well... limited by the number of display and interaction elements. You can extend this, with little modification)
• Main display mode shows all timers (no need to push a button to see the timers)
• wide range of intervals (1 second to 6 days (and thats only a coded limit)
• since I use an LED display it can be read from any angle and in any light situation
• With 2023 release V1.1: Set a timer in relation to another timer (Timer B should end XX Minutes before the already running timer A)
• With 2023 release V1.1: Alarm melody contains hint about the timer, that is on alarm

Easy and intuitive 2 Finger Operations

• Set and start timer
• Granularity of stepping adapts to total interval (there is normally no need to scroll over every second, when the interval is more then 10 minutes)
• Acknowledge alarm
• Change an already running timer (necessary when something irregular happened in the cooking process)
• put timer on hold
• dismiss timer
• check the inital time, the timer started from
• measure time when timer is over

Detailed Description

For detailed insights and operation manual see the wiki in the github project.

Development process

Lessons learned from Prototyping:

Putting the knob above the display is a bad idea. In general your hand and arm hide the display as soon as you grab the knob.

Using the decimal dots in the normal position is irritating. Thats why they where switched to the top in the final version

Far away targets

Things that would be nice, but are far away from my capabilites and time budget to get realized

• Battery powered device: Reducing power consumption without loss of readability (Reducing processor activity, replace led b other feasable technology with equivalent optical properties)