DIY
CIRCUITS

The time just seems to fly by when your unread email is piling up.

IT’S EMAIL TIME
Innocent-looking “clock” monitors the
unread-message pileup in your inbox.
By Tom Igoe

Photography by Tom Igoe

I have a lot of anxiety about email. Every kilobyte To build this yourself, you need to know how to in my Inbox destroys another minute of my life, but program a microcontroller and how to do some I can’t stop checking it. So I decided to embody basic web programming. For microcontroller my anxiety in a device that would worry about my programming, see the Primer article in MAKE, incoming mail for me. I’ve always liked clockwork Volume 04 (page 158), or my book Physical mechanisms, so I made my email fetish object in Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical the form of a clock. For each kilobyte of new mail I World with Computers. For the web component, I receive, the clock ticks relentlessly forward. used a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script

Here’s the basic design I came up with. The written in Perl, but you can also write CGI scripts clock itself is driven by a microcontroller, which in PHP, Python, Ruby, and other languages. connects to the internet and queries a program that checks my email accounts. The program Building It reports back the number of kilobytes, and the I started by looking for the simplest way to drive microcontroller moves the clock forward a tick the clock. I carefully took the clock apart and for each kilobyte. Simple! examined the circuit board inside. There was a