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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

I would like a physical timer with a keep-alive button.

You can start the timer and it will count up. Every 15 minutes or so a bright and noticeable LED will light up. If I push the button the LED turns off and the timer continues. If I don't push the button the timer pauses. I have 5 minutes to push the button. (When the timer pauses it subtracts half the time since I last pushed the button.)

And make it a big clicky arcade-cabinet style button that is fun and easy to push.

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I built a similar device (works more like the linked software), using illuminated buttons, and big RGB arcade button for the main action.

https://doug.lon.dev/software/hardware/2018/06/24/the-task-s...

I stopped using it about a year or so ago, I didn't feel the need to keep recording every context change, and I also never really looked at the reports or drew much of any conclusion about the data.

It would be reasonably simple to use my software on the desktop, or in another device, and add countdown feature. It's all open source.

In the end the device was a bit of a vehicle to learn new things; hardware development, aspects of the software and I also subsequently re-wrote the web service on AWS serverless as well.

It's the other way round but I use a time timer[1] to give me a visual indication of how much time is left. I usually put around 40 min & extend by 15~30min if I want to focus more. It doesn't have a big clicky button, but I find physically rotating the dial satisfying.

I've also experimented with iOS timer to stop playing music after the set time is up and that worked well as a non intrusive reminder too.

[1] https://www.timetimer.com/

Yeah, there's a thousand options for counting down, but there's nothing that counts up while ensuring that you're still on task. I'm sure there are some complicated apps that half work[0], but I want a physical device. I want to occasionally press an oh-so-satisfying physical button to attest that I'm still on task. This also solves the problem of forgetting and leaving the timer running, which destroys your record of how long you've worked. With my proposed device, the timer will stop by itself if you forget about it.

[0]: I say "half work" because an app can't ensure you're on task.

Hmm yeah I can see the appeal of something like that. I just had a look in my local Amazon and saw this study timer with a nice physical button which seems to have "Count up" functionality [1][2]. But it doesn't seem to have a feature to alert you while counting up.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dretec-T-580WTDI-Study-Timer-S...

[2] https://youtu.be/Ak_TjtWc8uo?t=294 (enable caption)

Not exactly what you want but I have a few of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B016KDK7NA

It comes with vibration, beeps, and LED; each can be turned on or off separately. I have mine only set to LED. If it goes off I can stop it, which automatically sets the timer back to what I started it at. It doesn’t auto-pause or anything but it works for me!

I love this thing! There are few options for light only timers, and from the pictures I assumed it would just be easily breakable plastic junk, but it's actually pretty solidly built.

How about a big tactile egg timer that makes a noise when time is up and can be set to 20 or 30 minutes?

It could be semi-transparent with a RGB LED inside that moves from white to red over the last five minutes on the timer. Push the top to cycle a few different set tasks (indicated by led-color?), wind up to start. Power and data over USB?

I need to save up for a new 3d printer and build this for myself.

There are timer cubes that start when you put them on each side (5min, 15min, etc)

Intrigued, could you explain how you would use it so I can understand why you want it to function like this?

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