Maintain Healthy Habits with This Daily Tracker Device

Whomst among us can honestly say that they can maintain healthy habits without struggle? That’s really hard to do, especially when you only have your own willpower to rely on. But “gamification” can do wonders for those of us with certain personality types, as the simple act of logging data and receiving visual feedback on progress is a great motivator. There is a reason that fitness apps make a big deal about not breaking streaks, after all. To put that same motivation into a physical device, Redditor Dycus designed this “Habit Tracker.”

Inspired by Simone Giertz's Every Day Goal Calendar, this device has an LED indicator for 364 days of the year — 52 weeks of 7 days each. It can track up to four different daily habits, which could be anything from exercising to journaling. A set of buttons on the bottom lets the user switch between each of those four habits, so they can enter their success or failure each day and visualize their progress. The device looks great, seems pretty intuitive to use, and could provide real benefits to people who respond well to this sort of motivation.

But building this Habit Tracker isn’t for the faint of heart, because Redditor Dycus designed it with hand-wiring in mind. A Teensy 2.0 development board controls all of the functionality, but it has to monitor all of the buttons and set the states of all 369 LEDs (the 364 days, plus 5 status lights). The daily LEDs are all arranged in hand-wired matrices controlled by the Teensy through shift registers and MOSFETs, complete with resistors and capacitors.

Dycus did a fantastic job with the wiring and it looks very tidy, but most of us lack the discipline to duplicate that—maybe that’s ironic, considering the purpose of the device.

All of those components fit into a lovely 3D-printed enclosure that looks really nice. If you do decide to build this Habit Tracker, Dycus was kind enough to upload the 3D files for that enclosure to Printables, along with the Arduino code for programming the Teensy.