Today I spent some time thinking about possible simple products that I could market while I continue to work on my robot. One thought that came to mind was a color-coded illuminated egg timer. It would have an RGB LED inside a plastic egg shell, and would change in color from blue to red and then flash when time’s up.

Here’s the demo circuit with Arduino:

Here’s the schematic for the RGB hook-up:

And here’s the video:

NOTES:

1. To diffuse the LED light for this test, I made use of the bottom part of the prototype grisbot made from instamorph. In real life, I would probably use a molded plastic egg.

2. For demo purposes, the timing is cut short. I believe it takes three minutes to hard boil an egg. Perhaps there could be different color-coding for soft and hard boiled times.

3. Instead of an Arduino, an ATTiny would be used in the actual product. Output voltage on the Tiny is only 3V, so perhaps the resistors could be eliminated. A very clean design indeed!