ESP32 Rotary Display Makes Very best Timer

We’re large followers of pushing {hardware} into conditions it wasn’t designed for right here at Hackaday, however typically you’ve received to understand a properly designed gadget doing kind of precisely what it was meant for — particularly when it’s courtesy of code that’s freely obtainable so that you can run and hack on nonetheless you want.

That’s exactly what [mircemk] has done with their “Universal Timer” project. The 2.1 inch CrowPanel “Rotary Display” on the coronary heart of the construct combines an ESP32-S3 with a 480×480 spherical contact display screen show and a rotary encoder.

The all-in-one machine — clearly meant to be harking back to the Nest thermostat and comparable business choices — is technically all you want, however on this case it’s been joined by a PCF8574 I2C I/O expander which in flip is used to drive a buzzer that gives a little bit of audio suggestions on the finish of the countdown.

With the code [mircemk] has offered flashed onto the board, the rotary encoder ring constructed into the housing makes for an exceptionally intuitive enter for setting the specified time. It’s a bit like a high-tech model of the basic kitchen timer, as proven within the video under, you merely twist the ring and the graphics on the show rotate accordingly. Unlike grandma’s clockwork timer of previous nonetheless, this one can change shade because it nears zero, which makes it simpler to estimate how a lot time stays from throughout the room.

As the recognition of smartwatches has introduced the price of these round shows down, we’ve began to see some very slick tasks using them. The numerous efforts to show them into desktop “radar” displays for nearby flights are a selected favourite.