A variation on this that I love is Tim Urban's "Your life in weeks" visualization.<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html</a><p>This is a progress bar, not a countdown clock. Personally, I find it super helpful in keeping perspective on the value of my time.<p>I do not mean to detract from OP's work (which is cool), I just thought others reading the comment might enjoy this other article too.
ATmega's EEPROM has a lifetime of 100k write/erase cycles. The program stores current time every 10 minutes, giving it ~2 years of lifetime. It looks like the clock will die long before you.
Cool - it'd be fun to wear one of these on your sleeve, and glare meaningfully at it when people start droning on about nothing in a meeting or whatever.<p>Although, it'd also be some embarrassing morbid irony if you run into an accident somewhere.
I’ve seen a similar low-tech version of this clock (sorry I can’t find a link). You setup two jars. Fill one with 365 * (years of life left). In the morning you move a single bead from the full jar to the empty one. It’s supposed to help you visualize “spending” your days, and encourages you to live them more deliberately.
A simple improvement would be to use the average life expectancy given a certain age. This can be calculated with the age specific death rates for a population: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table</a>
Tangent: I see example.jpg added to the main repo, just for the readme. If you don't want to store binary blobs, there's an alternative: open a new issue, then copy-paste the image into the issue. It'll give you a link that you can use in a readme permanently.
I actually designed one of these with the opposite mindset for a longevity researcher friend of mine. It was her 30th birthday and I was unable to attend, so I told her I would make sure to attend her 130th birthday instead and I gifted her a clock counting down until then.
"The Lindy Effect is real (up to the biological limits of the human body)."<p>The Lindy Effect is explicitely for non biological systems: i.e. the car, the chair not your mother.
Cool project. I first saw Aubrey de Grey's TED Talk "A Roadmap to End Aging" [1] when it was first released online and it really impacted the way I think about mortality in a similar way.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_a...</a>
Read Michael Ende's 'MOMO' to realize that one can not 'waste time'! I should do so again as well. One tends to forget while being in the rat race.
So clearly defined...<p>#define FINAL_EPOCH_TIME_SECONDS 2895868800 // this is the expected epoch time of your life expectancy<p>Which is October 7, 2061, a rainy Friday.
After power failure, clock will be 0..10 minutes behind the schedule. If the value written to EEPROM was ahead of actual wall clock by half of timespan between writes (instead of current time), each restart would contribute -5..5 minutes of drift, averaging out to zero over long time and multiple power failures.<p>One could in fact set it to update EEPROM only once a day, but write time half day ahead of current time. This will prevent wearing out memory for hundred of years while still maintaining decent accuracy.
If the tinkering isn't an end unto itself, an easier alternative is to buy a simple countdown clock on Amazon for ~$15. I got this one for $12 to countdown until the end of my postdoc.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TSC1X8/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TSC1X8/</a><p>Just pull of the retirement sticker.
i wanted to make one of these but in the form of a watch you wear on your wrist. its interesting how some people are fascinated with these kinds of countdowns and others hate looking at them. me and my other cs buddy both think its interesting -- he has the tim urban poster on his wall. another friend of mine doesnt even want to look at it.
Split format (ymd/hms) doesn’t feel as fatal to me as e.g. 1 167 607 224 seconds remaining, where each week eats 0,05% and each year is ~ 31 557 000. It would be also nice to make time much slower at the beginning and much faster towards the end, as it really is IRL.
a problem i see is that humans tend to manifest thoughts they believe in.<p>when you see something that often (daily) you could think it is real (for the good or the bad).