Arduino Suction Timer
Project Showcase
Working Prototype Video and Commentary
Executive Summary
For this project, I decided to tackle a problem that my avid rock-climbing family and I have continuously faced; which was being able to check how much time is left in a climbing session. Normally when I climb, I set an alarm on my phone to make sure that I am staying on track (eg. a certain amount of time for warmup, then grip training, then actual climbing, cooldown, etc.). However, it is always difficult for me to check how much time I actually have left since climbing chalk makes it impossible to use the touchscreen on my phone, and I am always afraid of taking my phone out of my pocket if I am climbing high up and don’t want to drop it.
This is why I decided to create a timer that uses physical buttons instead of a touchscreen; one that you can also just mount directly onto the climbing wall for easy viewing. As I started and subsequently continued my way through the design process, I was able to continuously reflect on what I was learning. A great example of this was learning how to put everything that I head learned in school design classes into fruition. Previously, each class that I would take would mostly consist of a few topics at a time (Part/Assembly Modeling, Rendering, Sketching, Wiring, Coding). However, up until now, I had never been able to put every one of these concepts together to build off of each other and create a design packet. Another essential lesson that I can now reflect on is the idea of learning how to innovate and add my own twist to what we had already learned in class. For example, I created an in-progress review for myself to highlight what I had completed and evaluate how to approach the next steps of the project. This was much more helpful than I initially expected, and it allowed me to plan and organize the future of the project instead of just going at things blindly.
I had plenty of experience with certain components that came in my basic Arduino kit, however for my timer I wanted to also use a component that I had never used before, the segment display. I learned how to blend what I was familiar and unfamiliar with together to create something totally unique which I would not have been able to do without branching out of my comfort zone and using a kit item that was new to me.
My timer works by having 4 physical buttons: start, reset, + time, and - time, wired on a breadboard to the Arduino Uno. I also have wired a segment display that shows the countdown of the timer and when the countdown reaches 0, a buzzer plays a loud noise to get the climber’s attention if they were distracted or couldn’t see. All in all, I am very happy with how my project turned out, as I was able to create exactly what I envisioned with the invention working perfectly!
Prototype Gallery
Sketches and Rendering
Exploded View Diagram
