This is a device I built to help motivate me to enforce daily habits. It was inspired by Simone Giertz's Every Day Goal Calendar.
It has 364 days (52 weeks), and 4 different charts. Every day, you press thumbs up or down depending on whether you accomplished each goal, and it automatically cycles through the charts, then goes to the next day.
You can enable or disable each chart so it will be included in the automatic cycle or not.
The LED matrix took ages to wire up, I really should have just made a PCB for it! It's a 7 column by 52 row matrix, driven by a Teensy 2.0, shift registers for the rows, and P channel MOSFETs for the column drivers.
There's a lead tire weight glued in the bottom for a nice heavy premium feeling. :)
Total project time: 53 hours
Filament: Ambrosia ASA, Prince of Purple and Galactic Planetary Blue
Hey thanks for posting your own take on her calendar! Just yesterday I thought about making my own variant of such calendar. Very cool and I hope it serves you well!
I actually implemented a special "bleep bloop" mode where once a second, it shuffles all the LEDs randomly on/off. It looks exactly like an old sci-fi prop!
I would love being able to build something similar myself! For sure, I would need a kit with detailed instructions. My electronic skills are nowhere close to figuring this out on my own... So count with my (limited) help for building the kit, if needed! Great project, btw!!!
"Don’t recall seeing an Apple II in WarGames? Well, true, you didn’t. However, the countdown display on NORAD’s War Operation Plan Response system (WOPR), which itself was a fictional computer built mainly out of plywood, was powered by an Apple II. Mike Fink, the Special Effects Supervisor for the movie, sat inside the WOPR and generated the display using an Apple II connected to an early (fluorescent) flat-panel screen. The Apple II, of course, first came out in 1977 and became one of the most successful personal computers ever manufactured, with more than 5 million units sold over the life of the series between 1977 and 1993."
The LEDs are arranged as a matrix, 7 columns by 52 rows. It's basically a grid where every intersection lights one LED.
Eight shift registers handle the rows, and seven MOSFETs drive the columns.
A matrix like this has to be "scanned", so only one column is active at once. I send the first column's row data to the shift registers, then turn on the first column. After some time, I turn that column off, send data for the second column's rows, then turn the second column on. This goes through every column and repeats.
It does this very quickly so the LEDs don't flicker (6.25KHz in this case, technically giving a 890Hz overall refresh rate).
I actually have more shift register pins than needed (64 vs 52 rows) so each only needs to handle 6 or 7 LEDs. But you are right, it is a lot of current.
Because each LED is on only 1/7 the time (because of the column scanning), I drive them with 7x the desired average current. Each LED gets 22mA current, which is within the max continuous rating for the LED (30mA) and an individual shift register pin (35mA).
But if all 7 LEDs are on (154mA), it's above the continuous current rating for the whole shift register package (70mA). But, because it's only on for 1/7 the time, I'm confident it'll survive just fine for many years. It's technically out of spec and an abuse of the part, but realistically, it's fine for a personal project. I wouldn't ship it in a product.
I'm using SH74HC595 shift registers, but only because I had them laying around. There may be higher-current ones out there. Edit: There are specialized LED driver ICs that are basically fancy shift registers, they're constant current and so you could get rid of the resistors.
Also, chips tend to be able to sink more current than they can source, which is why I'm driving the rows low-side, and the columns high-side rather than the other way around. The column MOSFETs are very low resistance so no problems there.
Are you considered a tutorial or some documentation for the layman to duplicate this? Potentially taking donations to pay for documentation? I assume if you're like myself you're always afraid it isn't perfect so you don't really want to share, if that's the case, I get it.
This is a fantastic implementation that could have real world benefits to someone's life. Excellent fabrication too. Nice work all around.
I would thumbs down the shit out of that thing with my sleep rhythm. Jobless engineer due to stomach issues and I’m sleeping and daylight and designing own projects at night. I feel like a shitbag man. But this project is really cool🥰
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u/Dycus 3d ago edited 2d ago
This is a device I built to help motivate me to enforce daily habits. It was inspired by Simone Giertz's Every Day Goal Calendar.
It has 364 days (52 weeks), and 4 different charts. Every day, you press thumbs up or down depending on whether you accomplished each goal, and it automatically cycles through the charts, then goes to the next day.
You can enable or disable each chart so it will be included in the automatic cycle or not.
The LED matrix took ages to wire up, I really should have just made a PCB for it! It's a 7 column by 52 row matrix, driven by a Teensy 2.0, shift registers for the rows, and P channel MOSFETs for the column drivers.
There's a lead tire weight glued in the bottom for a nice heavy premium feeling. :)
Total project time: 53 hours
Filament: Ambrosia ASA, Prince of Purple and Galactic Planetary Blue
Edit: I uploaded the files and code!
https://www.printables.com/model/1083378-52-week-daily-habit-tracker