AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built an Open Source screen timer for the m5stickc (Arduino)
I've never posted on ShowHN before, but I wanted to share my Xmas 2025 project; to try a new approach to controlling our kids screen time. This also involved massively over-engineering a solution in order to play with a shiny new gadget (and avoid the in laws at Christmas, obviously) I've shared some learnings on AI coding with embedded devices, and how I approached the product design/hardware selection side of things. The Web App is at https://screenie.org - and I'm Open Sourcing the device and web app code later today (links to follow on that site)
A screen timer for the M5StickC microcontroller built with Arduino, designed to help manage children's screen time. The project includes open-source hardware code and a companion web app at screenie.org. The builder… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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A few months ago, I was inspired by this post on Reddit, titled: Food items should have QR codes that instruct the microwave exactly what to do. Like high for 2 minutes, let stand 1 minute, medium 1 minutes.. I thought this was a pretty cool idea, and that it
2013 · madebynathan.com · its alternatives →
- 2IM
Hi HN, I've been working on this project for the last 5 months, inspired by Screen Studio but runs 100% in the browser. Here is a demo of the editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7-etsFZgPI One of the big challenges of using the browser is getDisplayMedia, the API for recording screens, doesn't provide mouse coordinates for security reasons. Mouse coordinates are important for auto-focus animations. So I trained a YOLOv11 model to detect mouse cursors and I run inference in real time while you record. Also, I created my own Remotion-style renderer because I started with…
2025 · screenrecorder.me · its alternatives →
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A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! This is an SDK for ESP32s (microcontrollers) that runs against OpenAI's new WebRTC service [0] My hope is that people can easily add AI to lots of 'real' devices. Wearable devices, speakers around the house, toys etc... You don't have to write any code, just buy a device and set some env variables. If you have any feedback/questions I would love to hear! I hope this kicks off a generation of new interesting devices. If you aren't familiar with WebRTC it can do some magical things. Check out WebRTC for the Curious[1] and would love to talk about all the cool things that does also.…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The Marketplace For User-Generated Hardware
2014 · edu.sphero.com · its alternatives →
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Hi everyone, I made this app Demo Scope lets you record or stream any mobile website with your face on screen and touch indicators showing every tap. I built it because I needed to demo my own side projects and hated the OBS/desktop setup. Load your site in the app, hit record, done. Or stream straight to Twitch/YouTube. Free to try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/demo-scope/id6755395174 Would love feedback if anyone tries it. I made a landing site centered around mobile demos for professional projects, but my main use case honestly has been Twitch…
Dec 2025 · demoscope.app · its alternatives →
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AI-powered screen memory — captures, analyzes, and lets you search/chat your screen history. Powered by Gemma 4 . 100% local, 100% private. - ayushh0110/ScreenMind
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai · its alternatives →
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Modern, minimal GUI for ActivityWatch
2019 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
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A functional demo app for the Invisible Screen. Use this as a reference to build your own apps. - image-gallery/HowToBuildAnApp.md at main · Invisible-Computers/image-gallery
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The Epilog Zing lasers were 50w desktop industrial lasers from circa 2010. They never had support outside of windows. This was based off of LibLaserCut which is a Java project that reverse engineered these machine's protocols. This is a CUPS driver implemented in Swift and C. Maybe this is a small example of AI doing something positive, like breathing new life into old machines :)
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PAI▲9Hi HN! I've been spending the past month on PAI, a Linux-esque harness for a personal assistant AI for your Mac. Instead of giving a chatbot a bunch of tools, I wanted to just drop the LLM into a terminal and see how it'd fare. I've been using it to manage my calendar, 5+ email accounts, and engaging with / responding to people in a timely manner (casus belli for this entire project). After seeing how other always-on assistants were designed, I thought the Unix / Linux philosophy of system design could be applied to AI harnesses, and I wanted to experiment with how it'd hold up…
Jul 2026 · whitematterlabs.ai · its alternatives →
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VSCode extension with games (Snake, Plinko, slots), HN/LessWrong reader, and Pomodoro timer for AI coding wait times. Fake currency only. Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TouchGra... Built in a week with Claude Code after seeing Chad IDE get ratio'd for integrating real gambling. Happy to answer questions or get roasted on the code.
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A little game I made to show off an old project. The functionality of the CPU is derived entirely from simulated logic gates. All the operations and control flow are based on the underlying properties of the logic gates, and changing their operation leads to corresponding changes in function. The original game code is all python and it runs in the browser using wasm/pyodide. Not very mobile friendly
2024 · loreley.one · its alternatives →
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After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hands on finetuning neural network models in computer vision
2024 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm Oliver. I've been in the software and cloud engineering industry for a long time (28 years), and this past year genuinely changed how I think about coding. The bottleneck isn’t syntax anymore. It’s clarity. I now spend more time describing what I want, testing results, and refining instructions than writing code line by line. The spark for this project came from a presentation I gave at my son’s school in December, 2025. I expected mild interest. Instead, kids were completely engaged — hands up, pitching game ideas, iterating in real time. That made me question something I’d…
Jan 2026 · pixelarcade.studio · its alternatives →
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I made my first macOS utility app that ships with a bundled Gemma 4 model, specifically the Gemma E4B one. It made my app DMG have 5.3 GB in size, but I think it is a small size for the power that this free local model can provide. It runs fine on CPU, but can also run on Apple Silicon GPU, although I did not notice any performance improvements with GPU (tested on a M5 chip). I think these local lightweight and multimodal models will open multiple possibilities for new software tools where privacy is essential.
May 2026 · snapname.app · its alternatives →
- 21EA
Hi HN, I’m building an agentic IDE for hardware developers. It currently supports Arduino, ESP32, ESP8266, and a bunch of other boards (mostly hobbyist for now, but expanding to things like PlatformIO). It can already write and debug hardware projects end-to-end on its own. The goal is to have it also generate breadboard views (Fritzing-style), PCB layouts, and schematics. Basically a generative EDA tool. Right now, it’s already a better drop-in replacement for the Arduino IDE. Would love feedback from folks here.
2025 · embedr.app · its alternatives →
- 22VI
This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.
2022 · docs.vaxiin.io · its alternatives →
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This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A retro portable game console project based on Arduino
2015 · gamebuino.com · its alternatives →
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