A kitchen timer with a quasi-logarithmic dial and a vintage panel meter
Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer
Annoyed by clunky digital kitchen timers, the author built his own: a digital countdown with an old-school analog display and a knurled adjustment knob. The dial splits into four linear sections—10-second steps up to 1 minute, 1-minute steps to 5, 5-minute steps to 30, and 30-minute steps to 3 hours—so it is self-documenting. A repurposed Crompton 244-05VG-LS switchboard meter, an AVR DB microcontroller, and a Bourns encoder complete the build.
Of course, all of this is very outmoded. The modern approach to hobby projects is to have an LLM do everything, then slap your name on it and submit straight to Hacker News.
- zokier
My microwave timer increases in 5, 10, 30, 60, ... second steps when turning the knob, so basically very similar scheme to this. Works pretty well imho.
With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
- krackers
What about removing the "0" label (which is implicit anyways) and having a label at 10sec instead. That would preserve the pattern that the last label is self-documenting as the increment interval.
- TomJansen
Kinda clever, not sure I understand why you want 25% of the dial dedicated to 0-60 seconds. In cooking nothing is really that precise to justify that
- exmadscientist
If you're not set on analog and want a countertop timer, just get one of these: https://www.thermoworks.com/products/extra-big-loud-timer (though probably on sale soon given the season). It's one of those products that just does exactly what it says on the tin: it's extra big (very easy to operate!) and extra loud (they do mean that one).
Though if you prefer a portable one you can stuff in your pocket they have that too, and it also does just what it says on the tin.
- clickety_clack
I like it, and maybe I’m log-brained after dealing with them for years, but I think the tick marks should compress as you go around the dial. The way it looks now, the distance from 4 to 5 is the same as 5 to 10, and it takes a second to figure out what’s going on with the tick marks.