Visual Timer for Toddlers

Time is an abstract concept, especially for toddlers who lack the intuition we adults take for granted. When I tell my toddler, "You have 5 more minutes to play," I can only imagine how meaningless that might sound to him. To bridge this gap, I designed and built a 3D-printed visual timer. This timer uses light tiles, an OLED screen, and a rotary encoder to make the passage of time more tangible and intuitive.

I also did this project as a 1-day project challenge, completed in just about 8 hours (with some extra time for 3D printing). Here's how it all came together. I really could've used a visual timer to track the 8h time for this too.

This worked better than I expected, the kid checks it from time to time and even ran to brush his teeth when he noticed the last cell went out.

Firmware

You will also need that if you want to build this, so get the Arduino code from either the hackaday article or the youtube video that I made for this project.

https://hackaday.io/project/201973-visual-timer-for-toddlers