Making a Pomodoro Timer

Slacking Off at work

• I get distracted Easy
• My mind drifts if I try to focus on a single task For more than 20-30 Minutes.
• If I try to fight the urge to just keep working my productivity goes way down.
• I end up working for a bit, then slacking off for half an hour.
• I can get more work done If I embrace my limitation and force myself to take a break.

Pomodoro Technique

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a Pomodoro, from the Italian word for tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used as a university student.

The Timer

• There are plenty of Pomodoro Apps I've tried using an app, but I would often forget.
• I wanted a physical device that was always on by desk and could grab my attention.
• I looked for a dedicated physical Pomodoro timer, but only found the kitchen timers
• I decided to make myself a timer using a Circuit Playground Express

Circuit Playground Express

• In my past episode about using a Pi pico to type passwords I mentioned I owned a playground express.
• The playground express is a micro controller with a lot of built ins
  • 2 buttons
  • 10 multi color LED
  • ...
• Runs circuit python with lots of libraries so it is easy to program.

TDD

• About once every other year I decided to start a project with as much TDD as I can.
• TDD Basics
  • Write a test BEFORE you write the code
  • Run the test - It will fail
  • Write the simplest code that will pass the test
  • Run the test and make sure it passes
  • Refactor/improve the code if needed.
• TDD advantages
  • Code is easy to separate into discrete functions
  • Parts of the code can be rewritten without affecting the rest
  • confidence in rewrites

pomodoro.py

• Circuit python looks for and runs a file named code.py
• A lot of the circuit Python code has to be run on the micro controller
• My Developers workstation does not have the LED's or buttons
• I split the some code into a separate file based on if it could run in "regular" python.
• I used TDD as much as possible to test the functions in pomodoro.py

code.py

BREAK_MINUTES = 5
WORK_MINUTES = 25

• Functions that require hardware
• No tests.
• counts down and changes color of led
• minutes divided by number of LED

Using the timer

• Ready
  • Green Light next to button to start work Period
  • Blue Light next to button to start break Period
• Working
  • White Background
  • Green progress pixels
• Break
  • White Background
  • Blue progress pixels
• Button A
  • Start working
• Button B
  • Start Break

Links

• https://gitlab.com/norrist/circuit_playground_pomodoro
• https://circuitpython.org/downloads
• https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-express/circuitpython-neopixel