The Lazydoro story - Part 1

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The Lazydoro

Lazydoro is potentially the most useful project I've built.

I use the Pomodoro method when I am writing or coding. It keeps me focused, and makes it easy for me to maintain progress. The Pomodoro technique involves working for 25 minutes without interruption, followed by a 5-minute break away from your desk. It helps with productivity, and it's good for your health.

There's just one problem. You need to remember to start a Pomodoro timer!

Using a timer

When I first started using the technique I tried using a web-based app to keep track of time.

Sometimes I remembered to use it, but sometimes I forgot. If I was deeply absorbed in what I was doing I lost track of time and failed to take my break. After a few days of that my mood and my knees suffered!

I tried building some hardware to make the Pomodoro technique easier to use.

Cushadoro
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Cushadoro

I started the project back in 2015. I called that version cushardoro - an Adafruit trinket attached to a resistive pressure sensor located in a cushion on my study seat!

It worked after a fashion, but it had several practical drawbacks. It required me to put some rather uncomfortable hardware in the cushion on my chair, and it was not very reliable. Sometimes it failed to notice me when I sat down, I had to make sure the battery was fresh, and the buzzer was the only form of feedback.

I also found it quite a challenge to program using the Arduino C-based environment. I'm not very comfortable programming in C, and I miss having a REPL for rapid feedback as I code.

I archived the project and forgot about it.

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Lazydoro Mk 1
Lazydoro is born

Back in 2018 Richard Kirby posted in the Raspberry Pint forum about his experiments with a ToF (Time of Flight) sensor.

I wondered if the sensor would work for my Pomodoro timer. Could I use a ToF sensor to check if I was in my chair ? I bought a VL53L0X sensor and tried it out.

It looked promising, and in February 2019 I started working on a prototype. It used the Adafruit Trinket M0, which I could program in CircuitPython.

The prototype had one input device (the distance sensor) and two output devices: the on-board NeoPixel display and a buzzer.

The application just checked the distance from lazydoro to the area in front of my keyboard.

When I was at my desk I was about 30 cm away; when I was taking a break the distance to the wall behind me was over 1 metre.

The application checked the distance and used that and the CircuitPython time.sleep() method to work out how the Pomodoro was going. It provided visual feedback using the on-board NeoPixel. When I was on a break it drove a buzzer to tell me when it was time to return.

The VL53L0X ToF distance sensor worked fairly well but there were occasional glitches when the sensor seemed to misread this distance. I asked Richard if he'd seen similar behaviour, and he had.

I tried to track the problem down but eventually gave up. I switched to another project and left the hardware in its project box for another year.

In January 2020 I decided to have another go.

Find out what happened in tomorrow's exciting episode!

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