ElBanquos Kitchentimer

An Arduino based “multichannel” Timer, optimized for tracking times during food preparation

Motivation

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.

• better control when setting the time (cheap timers normally just go up, higher settings are a pain, correcting after start is nearly impossible)
• no need to clean all your fingers to change a timer
• Smartphone normally switches of the screen, so you can’t see the current state (or they keep screen on and drain smart phone battery for neraly nothing)
• Smartphone somtimes is needed to check recepies, problem solutions or communicating (is that so?). 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) )
• Interval presets for your major use cases
• Assistence to set timer in relation to other timer
• Identity of alarming timer is “coded” in alarm melody

Easy and intuitive 2 finger operations

• Set and start timer
• Size of dial steps adapts to total interval (there is normally no need to scroll over every second, when the interval is more than 5 minutes)
• Acknowledge alarm
• Change an alreday running timer (necessary when something irregular happened in the cooking process)
• put timer on hold
• cancel timer
• check the original time, the timer started from
• measure time since timer is over

What you will find in the repository

• Arduino sketch for the timer
• Fritzing sketch for the hardware used in the implementation
• Manuals
  • English
  • German

What you also need

• my extended version of the arduino “ledcontrol” library: https://github.com/mattywausb/LedControl

How can you use it

• You can just build the timer by yourself using the same parts (check the fritzing sketch)
• The module architecture allows you to excahnge the elements of the interface
  • Display type
  • Kind of buttons input methods
  • sound generation

Video

• Demo and quick guide video

More details

• [check the wiki] (https://github.com/mattywausb/ElBanquos_kitchentimer/wiki)