Two years ago, someone on HN shared an interesting ADHD hack: a tiny LED that blinks at 120 bpm and gradually slows to 60 bpm, supposedly helping your brain sync and calm down into focus mode.
I found Qiaogun's implementation (ADHD_Blink) for M5StickC Plus, and adapted it for the newer M5StickC Plus2 with some tweaks - simpler 50% duty cycle flash, configurable ramp-down, auto sleep, etc.
Honestly, I'm not sure if it actually works. I'll be trying it out myself to see. But the building process itself was quite fascinating.
I used Claude Code for the entire implementation - from reading the original codebase, to modifying the firmware, to flashing the device. There's something surreal about an AI having full control over a physical piece of hardware.
It made me wonder: in the future, could AI-connected devices dynamically rewrite their own firmware based on user needs? Imagine telling your device "make this button do X instead" and it just... does.
I found Qiaogun's implementation (ADHD_Blink) for M5StickC Plus, and adapted it for the newer M5StickC Plus2 with some tweaks - simpler 50% duty cycle flash, configurable ramp-down, auto sleep, etc.
Honestly, I'm not sure if it actually works. I'll be trying it out myself to see. But the building process itself was quite fascinating.
I used Claude Code for the entire implementation - from reading the original codebase, to modifying the firmware, to flashing the device. There's something surreal about an AI having full control over a physical piece of hardware.
It made me wonder: in the future, could AI-connected devices dynamically rewrite their own firmware based on user needs? Imagine telling your device "make this button do X instead" and it just... does.
Original HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274782 Based on: https://github.com/Qiaogun/ADHD_Blink Hardware: M5StickC Plus2 (~$20)
Happy to hear thoughts, or if anyone has actually tried this LED trick.