Hacking Life into My Little Counter
I always have fun bringing the digital into the physical world. Things that you can touch and hear give tactile joy - bonus points if there’s no/low-power display. So someone at work posted that the Shopify Counter was available for something like 10% of the manufacturer’s list price, I jumped at the chance to pick one up and hack something together. By default, the counter guides you to configure sales/orders to display, but we can have more fun than that.
The API is beautifully simple: you just need to provide an HTTP endpoint that will return a number. The counter is connected to Wifi and pings the Smiirl servers every few seconds, which will just proxy the request to your own server. I’m using val.town to run mine (increasingly finding that service invaluable) - took me all of one minute to build it.
The sound the display makes when changing numbers is very satisfying (and jarringly loud).
I wanted this to be something that others could enjoy. I wanted this to update often (a counter that never changes is no fun). And I wanted it to be artistically engaging as well. So, here’s what I built: we choose whether this counter grows or dies.
When you visit that page, you have the option to increase the counter - help it grow, care for it, nurture it, as a community - or you can kill the counter - for everyone. Whatever people do on that page updates my counter at home within a second or two. We’ll see how it goes! We’ll see how generous or murderous people are.
But I didn’t want my art piece to have the Shopify logo on it. I figured I could put an NFC tag on it or a QR code somewhere to let visitors to the physical space interact with it (I ended up doing both). But cracking the thing open was really really hard. The closest attempt I found online is this video of a guy who melts the back panel to get it open - yuck. But I finally figured out that you can pop off the entire front casing by slowly working your way around and lifting the plastic snaps/latches:
From there it was a simple insert of the QR code on cardstock and then carefully snapping it all back together. It’s been working flawlessly for all of 24 hours now.
And I found a place for this giant display to sit on my tool wall. It’ll live in the background of my video calls and I hope people find it fun to play with while we’re chatting - in-person or online.
Future
We’ll see how this goes - I may grow bored if it never changes. Other ideas I had that I may build this into in the future:
- Make two physical buttons (grow and kill) and put them in our home for people to play with
- Call the Strava API to total my distance run or something like that
- Count down the seconds to some future date
- Display the minutes since my birth or something related to my age
- Assign numbers to a set of messages (e.g. “it’s going to snow” or “a package was delivered”) and display messages-as-numbers
Send me your ideas! I’d love to hear them.