Pomo is a hardware Pomodoro timer virtual pet for your desk. It can help motivate you to work hard in concentrated bursts of productivity with small breaks in between.
Feed Pomo by completing a set of timed work legs in a row. Give him food during downtime. Keep up a configurable goal rate of work for Pomo to keep him healthy.
Don’t worry about tracking a clock; Pomo will let you know when it is time to take a break, suggest an activity, and let you know when to get back started. The only thing you need to do is press and hold the buttons to let Pomo know you are ready.
Inside the box is an Adafruit HalloWing M4 Express and a NeoKey FeatherWing with two Kailh box white switches for a satisfying clack. droxpopuli printed up a PyPortal-inspired case and added a glass lens for a spiffy tube TV look.
Pomo himself is a cute little jack-o-lantern looking creature with a teddy bear face and no arms or legs. He could eat with his face, but prefers to be fed. That’s where you come in. You feed him by completing a set of four 20-minute work intervals.
Why use a Pomodachi?
Like many, I had to work remote starting with the pandemic, and had a little bit of difficulty keeping myself focused on a task at hand. I turned to the Pomodoro Technique, but had trouble because it felt artificial and self imposed at times. Pomodachi hopes to solve that in a few ways:
- Make it fun: Pomodachi should give a fun little way to flavor and motivate productive time without being overly gamified.
- Make it low impact: Pomodoro is about inducing flow, and the awareness of the state of timers can be a distraction. Pomo abstracts away the need to know the exact state of your timers during work time, letting you focus on the present.
- Make it hackable: I’m learning a lot of stuff myself in the process of making this, so I picked parts and make choices that hopefully make the project accessible to any re-implementers.
See more in the GitHub repo and in this Hackaday article.
