Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer

The project is a homemade kitchen timer designed to avoid the awkward controls, dirty reflective screens, and limited usefulness of common alternatives. It combines an analog panel meter with a side-mounted knob, using a “quasi-logarithmic” dial that allocates more space to short intervals while covering up to three hours. The face is divided into four ranges: seconds up to one minute, then one-to-five minutes, five-to-30 minutes, and 30 minutes to three hours. Each range has its own tick spacing, while the printed boundary labels also indicate the increments used in the next range. This makes settings such as three or 20 minutes easy to read and enter without crowding the dial.

The meter is a modified surplus ammeter with a custom-printed face, housed in a simple maple enclosure intended to be easy to clean. Tapping an illuminated top button wakes the device; the user then sets time with a tactile rotary encoder. After 20 seconds without input, it sleeps, while a three-second pause after the final adjustment starts the countdown. The knob can change the interval while the timer runs. At zero, an alarm sounds every 15 seconds until dismissed by the button or silenced by adding time. An inexpensive AVR microcontroller drives the meter with PWM, and a small speaker provides the alarm. The design offers a practical, hands-on alternative to digital controls, with its interface and time scale as central to the project as its electronics.