Busy Status Bar

If you're looking for something with an addressable LED matrix in a clock style form factor, the Ulanzi TC001 [0] for ~$50 is worth having a look at.

Doesn't quite have the same aesthetic but inside it's just an ESP32 (flashed via the USB-C port) and there's various mature open source firmware replacements. I use awtrix[1] on mine and it's very easy to tie in HomeAssistant for doorbell notifications and that sort of thing. I did also knock up a Pomodoro app for it.

0: https://www.ulanzi.com/products/ulanzi-pixel-smart-clock-288...

1: https://github.com/Blueforcer/awtrix3

I was going to say that $200 seemed awfully expensive for a programmable kitchen timer.

I've had a project idea for a while that would require a bit more juice. In short, I want to make a music practice timer for ADHD kids that avoid actually playing music during practice time. I want it to be beefy enough to run some simple ML for detecting instruments being played, and I only want the timer to count down while the instruments are playing. I picture it looking a lot like the clock above, but with something like a Raspberry Pi jammed inside so it's got enough power to reliably detect "violin."

Any ideas on hardware for that?

"Identifying Different Musical Instrument Sounds Using Fourier Analysis in LabVIEW" Rather than "ML" du jour, I would say that a fast Fourier transform would get you sufficient data to determine if practicing or talking or silence.

Definitely valid callout. I was also looking for an excuse to play with audio ML, but you're totally right that just examining a Fourier series could very likely do a great job of determining whether a given type of instrument is being played.

Which an FFT on an ESP32-S3 with it's Xtensa LX7 vector extensions can be quite fast

https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/16asjx9/esp32s3_do...