Open this page at https://padraigfl.github.io/pomodoro/

BBC MicroBit Pomodoro experiment

As the device has a very basic UI and a sound module I figured it had decent potential as a Pomodoro timer and posed an interesting UI challenge in terms of conveying information.

Controls

Currently:

• A button: begins timer
• B button: stops timer

Planned:

Default Behaviour

• A button: begins/resumes timer
• B button: pauses timer
• B button + Button: stops timer
• A + B (for reverse functionality): opens config

Menu Behaviour (sets Work, Break, Long break and Cycle length in order)

• A button: add + 1 to current value (max 25 for first three, 9 for cycle)
• B button: confirm setting

UI

Minutes are represented by one LED,

Work periods are displayed from top of screen, eg.

#####
#####
####.
.....
.....

Breaks are displayed from the bottom of the screen, eg.

.....
.....
.....
....#
#####

Cycle stage is displayed via a number, eg

..#..
.##..
..#..
..#..
.###.

UI loops through the following screens every 4 seconds:

• current minutes remaining
• total minutes in current storage, dimmed LED
• current part of cycle
• total parts in cycle, dimmed LED

Goals

• Basic pomodoro functionality with representative within device constraint
• Accurate timing (within a few seconds of accuracy via the input.runningTime() function)
• Sound effects on state changes
• Pause/Stop/Resume functionaly
• UI displays current settings on launch
• Ability to input specific times for work and breaks prior to starting
• ~ Ability to save inputted times ~
• ~ Ability to resume from current location (within a 1 minute range) in case of power failure~
• Work on MicroBit v1 without sound (needs testing)

Issues encountered

Writing to the internal storage is not achievable via MakeCode so a rewrite in MicroPython is required. I will initially write the menu UIs in MakeCode and that can then be cross referenced with the MicroPython code which should be largely the same

The TypeScript compiler had some issues with some things I tried to do (in particular enum values) so I decided to work around it for now.

To edit this repository in MakeCode.

• open https://makecode.microbit.org/
• click on Import then click on Import URL
• paste https://github.com/padraigfl/pomodoro and click import

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