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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/z4nsei on 2026-06-17 12:34:32+00:00.
My son recently told me he needed a physical timer to keep track of his screen time and homework. Any normal parent would have gone to Amazon, spent five bucks on a cheap plastic kitchen timer, and called it a day.
But I have an active Home Assistant setup and zero impulse control when it comes to tinkering.
So instead of a plastic egg timer, he ended up with a round, glowing ESP32 touchscreen puck running ESPHome. And because I completely lose all self-control once a project gets fun, the timer part quickly became the least interesting thing about it.
Before I knew it, I was adding a wake word so he could just say "Alexa, set a timer," followed by a weather display, a music controller, and even a couple of actual arcade games (because I apparently had way too much coffee that weekend). The original timer he asked for is basically just one of the modes now.
It was total overkill. I spent way too many hours squinting at my monitor trying to align custom UI elements on a tiny round screen just to count down ten minutes. But it was a ton of fun to build and I would absolutely do it again.
It is still very much a work in progress, but if you want to check out my messy configuration or build something similar, I'm hosting the code on GitHub.
Here is the device I used: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005011771382178.html
And here is my WIP repo: https://github.com/MichalZaniewicz/esphome-guition-jc3636k718c-va/