Creating an IRL Death Clock

Inspiration

If you haven’t read the waitbutwhy’s article on why our time is more precious then it seems. I’d reco giving it a quick read thru when you have a sec. Essentially, it talks about looking at ones life on a macro perspective. More specifically: splitting up your whole life into blocks of time. Helping you visualize and appreciate how little time we actually have.

Based on this clever idea of visualizing ones life from a different perspective, I wanted to create a physical object to show where I was on this macro view. Unlike a simple number to represent how many years I’ve lived so far, maybe it would be cool to see how many days I have till my “expiry date.”

Exploration

In the beginning of my sketch sessions, I was thinking of this project as more of art piece. This allowed me to explore abstract alternative versions like large LED dots on a board, each representing time in weeks, months or years. I still really like the idea of a large panel of wood with a bunch protruding pixels, slowly counting down like a progress bar of your life, and hung on a wall as the main focal point/art piece in a room. I struggled with the direction of making it more abstract or logical for a while. But I decided that an actual number was a bit more tangible and would really hammer home the idea that time is passing fast.

For the styling of the numbers, I really wanted to go with those old school flip clocks. But there’s one thing I’ve learned from creating person projects: Making a small project tends to grow out of control and into a huge one very quickly. So I decided to go even simpler and keep the hardware fuckery to a minimum. Especially since I’ve never played around with an Arduino before, I removed that potential nightmare early on.

Execution

I decided to go with a retro looking 7 segment display because it’s got that “Back to the Future” vibe. So that’s just a no brainer.

I chose the colour red because it’s eye catching and energetic. So when glanced at, it gives you a nice jolt to get your ass in gear.

Coding was a huge pain. I’ve been a designer for most of my life and been avoiding any deep dive into heavy scripting languages. I’ve done my share of HTML/FLASH/CSS basics, but nothing like C++. So to complete this project (without asking friends to code it for me,) I had to learn the fundamentals of C++. That being said, its not as bad as I expected it to be. The real hurdles were finding a way to display each number thru the proprietary Adafruit backpack that the LEDs are solder onto.

Things I’ve learned

Grit with Breaks: Keep working and focused on the next roadblock at hand. Don’t feel bad about taking breaks when you hit a wall. Do something completely different for a bit to get your mind off the fact that you’re too dumb to proceed. You should feel good that you’ve hit a difficult point. That means you’re learning. Always go back when you’ve had enough time away from it.
Play & Learning: I was flipping back and forth between two states of mind throughout this project. The first was a state of playing around with trial & error experimentation; Not knowing really how C++ worked at all, and taking other people’s code and mashing it together to see what would happen. Then switching to a more traditional way of learning. Reading “how-to” guides about the compiler, basic language structure, etc. This was the most boring phase but yielded the best progress. Although without the joyfulness brought from the play phase, my interest in the project would have probably waned quite quickly.
Life Expectancy: While estimating my estimated death date. There was a dropdown to choose your mindset: positive, pessimistic, or neutral. Selecting even the neutral one compared to the pessimistic took off almost 2000 days from your life expectancy. That’s significant when you only have 16K to go. This also applies to drinking weekly vs monthly. Seeing that number in days drop feels more impactful then that number in just years alone.
Hands On: Working with your hands and soldering is very satisfying. There’s a feeling you get when software and hardware work together that I think every designer should experiment with. Also, having a good soldering iron really helps here, trust me.
Battle Between Ego & Logic: I restrained myself from asking friends for coding help, which could have solve my coding woes in probably 5 minutes. But going thru the pain of learning and failing a new process, I believe is the only real way I can learn something. That being said, I gave myself a week window of problem solving time. If I couldn’t make significant progress in that time. I’d ask for help. My logic was that if I left the project sit for too long without much progress, I’d risk the chance that I might lose interest; Which is the most dangerous killer of personal projects. So it’s really a battle of ego vs the project actually getting done.
Modifiers: While working one night, I took small dose of noopept(2.5ml), green tea extract(5x drops), and Yerba mate extract(5x drops). It really helped me focus and get my teeth into learning the basics of C++. It seemed to have toned down my usual ADHD tendencies and increased my “flow” state. I need to do more research on this one though.

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Resources

Hardware:

2x LEDs + Backpacks
Bread board
Wires
Arduino Uno
Solder kit & wire clippers

Code:

Arduino Code

Resources:

Assembly Instructions

Connecting 2 backpacks

How to modifying the backpack addresses

C++ Basics

Estimating your time of Death