Abishek Muthian's Memory Hammer Is an ePaper Review Device Designed for the Anki Flash Card System
Communicating with the official Anki app over the network, this neat ePaper gadget tries to prevent accumulation of due-soon review cards.
Maker Abishek Muthian has put together a little ePaper gadget designed to prevent accumulation of review cards when studying using the Anki flash card platform: the Memory Hammer.
"If you forget to stick to the rigorous Anki review schedule then the cards start to leech and soon you'd reach a point where there are large number of unreviewed cards," Muthian explains of the problem he has attempted to solve. "Those who are new to Anki get disheartened by this and don't use it any more. But since Memory Hammer is always-on by our side, We can review the cards as and when they're due and so cards don't get accumulated."
The Memory Hammer is built using a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless single-board computer and a 2.13" touch-sensitive ePaper Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) add-on connected to its general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header. A Python script running on the Raspberry Pi connects to the Anki desktop app via Anki Connect, the company's application programming interface, and downloads the available decks on-demand.
The touchscreen display provides a simple user interface. The list of decks can be browsed, and once a deck is selected the cards are shown with a button to flip between the front and back sides — along with an "Ease Factor" feedback system. If no cards are due, the device goes into a sleep mode and checks for due cards every 20 minutes.
"The latency is within acceptable range even for the cases where downloading data is involved," Muthian explains. "If you are used to other ePaper devices like [the Amazon] Kindle then I don't see much of a difference."
More details are available in the project's Reddit thread, while the source code has been published to GitHub under the reciprocal GNU Affero General Public License 3.