Task: The Ambient Planner by Arjun Kalyanpur.
Welcome to my first Instructable; Task: The Ambient Planner!
I believe smartphones and social media lead us to feel overwhelmed and overloaded by the amount of detailed information we consume each day. Add in the fact that some jobs expect almost 24/7 reachability, and our once organized planners begin to look a lot like daunting novels.
Enter Task: The Ambient Planner. By connecting an online to-do list (Todoist, https://todoist.com/) to Task, we can reduce some of the informational clutter we get assaulted with each day.
Now, when you add or complete an item on your list, Task will light up or turn off an LED in turn. In doing so, we can simply glance at an ambient display to see how much we have on our plates, rather than get overwhelmed with written or typed text.
Required for this project are the latest version of Arduino IDE (https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software) and subscriptions to the following three services: Adafruit IO (https://io.adafruit.com/), If This Then That (IFTTT; https://ifttt.com), and the online task management program, Todoist (https://todoist.com/).
Featured Adafruit Products!
Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 Breakout: Add Internet to your next project with an adorable, bite-sized WiFi microcontroller, at a price you like! The ESP8266 processor from Espressif is an 80 MHz microcontroller with a full WiFi front-end (both as client and access point) and TCP/IP stack with DNS support as well. While this chip has been very popular, its also been very difficult to use. Most of the low cost modules are not breadboard friendly, don’t have an onboard 500mA 3.3V regulator or level shifting, and aren’t CE or FCC emitter certified….UNTIL NOW! Read more.
NeoPixel Ring – 24 x 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers: Round and round and round they go! 24 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 2.6″ (66mm) outer diameter. The rings are ‘chainable’ – connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock. Read more.
Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.
To start, please visit https://io.adafruit.com, and take a look around. You can also visit our comprehensive tutorial located on the Adafruit Learning System.
We also have a blog/changelog specifically for Adafruit IO to keep you updated with the latest changes.
To make it easy for people to get started using Arduino or ESP8266 we have starter packs with just about everything you may want to connect to the internet, with known-working WiFi modules!
ESP8266 Huzzah Kit
CC3000 Huzzah Kit
