This Monthly LED Calendar Lets You Track Your New Year’s Resolution

Most of us have already given up on our New Year’s resolutions, but those of you with particularly strong willpower and dedication might still be at it. Even the best of you will, however, miss an occasional day of working out or eating only kale. Maybe you’re sick and can’t make it to the gym or your manager ordered pizza for the office. Whatever the case, you want to track those cheat days if you want to remain committed to maintaining your new lifestyle. Joshyeram created this simple and elegant LED monthly calendar that gives you the ability to easily note your success each day.

This project was inspired by Simone Giertz’s “Every Day Calendar,” which was a digital wall calendar that contained an LED indicator for every single day of the year and that launched through Kickstarter late last year. Joshyeram’s version is only capable of showing a single month at a time, but if gives you color-coded tracking for each day. At the start of the month, all of those LEDs are unlit. Before going to bed, you can simply press one button if you completed your resolution that day or the other button if you failed. A green light indicates success for a given day and a red light indicates failure. Button press combos can be used to edit a day, turn the LEDs off for bedtime, or to display an animated rainbow effect.

The calendar is controlled by an Arduino Nano board, which is small and helps keep the device compact. That controls a string of 31 Adafruit NeoPixel individually-addressable RGB LEDs. The two buttons are small capacitive touch sensors that are each built into their own PCBs. Those components are housed within a minimalist 3D-printed enclosure, which is divided into three sections that can be handled by most printer models. The enclosure is designed to be mounted to a wall, so you’ll want to use a long USB cable to run power from a wall wart in the nearest electrical outlet. All of the code to make the Monthly Calendar work is available on Joshyeram’s GitHub page. He created this digital calendar to track his own New Year’s resolution, which was to perform pull-ups in order to get back into climbing, but it should be effective for just about any binary goal that can be tracked as either “completed” or “skipped” each day.