Milk Time

The idea

A device that sits by the cot and tells you, in a cute way, when the next feed is due. One button, one screen, one job — because a parent doing this at 04:00 is not going to open an app.

Why it is worth showing

It looks trivial. It is not, and that is the point of putting it on the site.

Inside a shell smaller than a hand there is a microcontroller, a battery and its charging circuit, a display, a buzzer, a button, and the wiring to connect all of it — laid out so the case still closes and the button still sits where a thumb expects it.

Every wire in that photo is a decision. Where the battery sits changes where the board sits, which changes where the screen can go, which changes where the button ends up, which changes how the shell is printed.

How it came together

It starts on paper. Working out which pin does what, before anything is soldered, is faster than finding out later.

Then a board in a first shell, on the bench, with a USB cable hanging out of it — the stage where you find out whether the thing you drew fits the thing you printed.

Where it stands

A working prototype. The reason it is here is honesty about scope: when a client asks for “a simple device that just does one thing”, this is the amount of work that sits behind the word simple.