My microwave timer increases in 5, 10, 30, 60, ... second steps when turning the knob, so basically very similar scheme to this. Works pretty well imho.
With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
I used to have a microwave that controlled time with a rotary encoder. It did just that. Was pretty great because you could just give it a strong spin to get it up to like 20 minutes.
> With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
I had an old Frigidaire-made range a few years ago with a timer. It was a fairly basic thing; the only fanciful feature it had was a clock with a timer, a knob, and a VFD. No buttons at all; the mode was set by the direction of the initial turn. (The rest of the machine also worked with knobs: Simmerstats for the burners, and mode-select and thermostat knobs for the oven, with no computerization for those bits at all.)
It worked great. The rotary encoder was the most responsive I've ever used and did not appear to miss any steps. The velocity ramps were fantastic, and the knob was small in diameter and thereby easy to turn fast.
I could set a timer approximately with a quick, singular flick of my fingers, which was plenty good enough for most of my cooking. Setting a timer for about 20 or 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever) was simple.
If I wanted to be precise, that was also simple: Get to the right neighborhood with a clockwise flick, and then just turn the dial a bit slower to work in tighter precision (down to 1 minute per encoder stop).
It takes a lot of words to describe, but it was intuitive AF in use.
The clock didn't drift much over time (it was synchronized to line frequency -- not perfect anymore, but pretty good).
Walltime was easy to set (for DST buggery or power outage), too: Same knob, still no buttons. Same excellent acceleration ramps. Just start with an anticlockwise flick, and it's setting the clock instead of the timer.
(Screw it up by twisting it the wrong way on initial rotation? It didn't matter much because the cost of resetting the clock was very, very low and the action of it felt like a pleasant release from modern human interface chicanery)
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Clock on present-day oven also works, but it's crap. Pick a mode with a button. Set digits by holding or tapping up or down buttons. Accept input digits by pressing another button.
But tapping always only goes in 1-minute steps, which sounds nice except: The debounce is bad and it misses rapid taps. And holding it sounds nice, except: It always overshoots, by a lot -- the acceleration ramps are, to put it as kindly as I can, sadistic.
Setting the clock is miserable. The fastest and least-annoying way to adjust for DST is to mash the button 60 times at the right cadence: Too fast, and it misses inputs.
Too slow and it takes long enough that the motivation is to try the sadistic button-hold acceleration again (which will be uniformly punished by sending it even further away from the target than where it started).
I'd put black tape over the display (like a VCR from the 1980s) and forget about it, but: In a curse of integration-at-every-expense, this display is also used to set the temperature for the oven and I need that function.
I like it, and maybe I’m log-brained after dealing with them for years, but I think the tick marks should compress as you go around the dial. The way it looks now, the distance from 4 to 5 is the same as 5 to 10, and it takes a second to figure out what’s going on with the tick marks.
What about removing the "0" label (which is implicit anyways) and having a label at 10sec instead. That would preserve the pattern that the last label is self-documenting as the increment interval.
I like this, but I want a timer with at least 3 timers in it, memory options. I have a digital one from AliExpress, which is quite OK, except the alarm sound is too faint and the memory button UX is awkward.
Indeed. For a dial microwave (the pinnacle of UX design IMO) 5-10 seconds is perfect for warming food, but as a kitchen 'egg timer' I unfortunately can't see much utility to small increments.
Hang on, literal egg timing (boiled eggs) requires exact minutes and varies according to how you want your yolk, which in my case also depends on what I am using it for.
I like it, but like the kitchen timer I built a while back with a rotary encoder knob, it doesn't run on batteries forever like most cheap timers. Maybe with AI help I could get that done though. (At least for a digital one, not sure how much power that physical dial uses.)
If you're not set on analog and want a countertop timer, just get one of these: https://www.thermoworks.com/products/extra-big-loud-timer (though probably on sale soon given the season). It's one of those products that just does exactly what it says on the tin: it's extra big (very easy to operate!) and extra loud (they do mean that one).
Though if you prefer a portable one you can stuff in your pocket they have that too, and it also does just what it says on the tin.
This is, on the one hand, a very cool design, but on the other a sad indictment of more-buttons-is-better design in Western appliances. Go to Japan and most microwaves have two dials, one for power, one for time. 99.9% of the time you can get what you want with a twist of the time dial and be halfway through cooking/heating your food while the person with the keypad microwave is still trying to figure out which of the pre-Sumerian glyphs in dark grey on black keys against a black background is the one they need to press.
Microwaves... I personally find something else more annoying, the power output is often regulated by a very crude PWM - so basically if your magnetron is rated for 1 kW, "500W" is effectively 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, or 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off, 15 seconds on and 15 seconds off. Or whatever ratio the microwave controller uses under the hood.
That's fine if you need something to be in the microwave for a few minutes, but it absolutely sucks if you need something to be close to (or much less than) the period time... it's completely random and depending where the prior usage started, how much active time your ingredients experience.
For a number of years, I had a Panasonic inverter microwave. I found that it worked very well at its job of warming up food, like turning a frozen burrito from a cold brick into consistent-hot goopy shame, with no blowouts, and without having to do things like pause and flip it over.
It was programmable, too. 45 seconds on high, then 2 minutes at 50%? 45P5200S (where P is the Power button and S is Start).
I also found that nobody but me cared about any of that at all. Everyone else who ever used it always ran it at 100% power.
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One of these days, I'll get another one that has variable power like this again. But it'll be a "flat bed" Toshiba, since the present lineup from Panasonic all includes spinning glass carousels and those have always been both stupid and unnecessary.
Like the author, I've also found there are no great kitchen timers. I've had some ovens in the past that do an OK job, but my current one is terrible. I've been using a clockwork one for the past few years, but it does have the noted shortcoming of only ringing once.
The quasi-logarithmic idea is a good one. I would buy a simple one that just has a dial. No button required. But I agree with the other commenter that the 0-60 part would be quite useless for a kitchen timer. Better to have more resolution in the commonly used 0-30 minute range.
My current favorite kitchen timer is a Japanese one I got online. Its got 5 buttons: start/stop, reset, and add 1/3/5 mins (so for example a 12 min timer would be 5,5,1,1,start)
My microwave timer increases in 5, 10, 30, 60, ... second steps when turning the knob, so basically very similar scheme to this. Works pretty well imho.
With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
I used to have a microwave that controlled time with a rotary encoder. It did just that. Was pretty great because you could just give it a strong spin to get it up to like 20 minutes.
It is customary to make the microcontroller sample the rotary encoder too slowly, so that if you turn it too fast it doesn't notice you moved it.
> With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
I had an old Frigidaire-made range a few years ago with a timer. It was a fairly basic thing; the only fanciful feature it had was a clock with a timer, a knob, and a VFD. No buttons at all; the mode was set by the direction of the initial turn. (The rest of the machine also worked with knobs: Simmerstats for the burners, and mode-select and thermostat knobs for the oven, with no computerization for those bits at all.)
It worked great. The rotary encoder was the most responsive I've ever used and did not appear to miss any steps. The velocity ramps were fantastic, and the knob was small in diameter and thereby easy to turn fast.
I could set a timer approximately with a quick, singular flick of my fingers, which was plenty good enough for most of my cooking. Setting a timer for about 20 or 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever) was simple.
If I wanted to be precise, that was also simple: Get to the right neighborhood with a clockwise flick, and then just turn the dial a bit slower to work in tighter precision (down to 1 minute per encoder stop).
It takes a lot of words to describe, but it was intuitive AF in use.
The clock didn't drift much over time (it was synchronized to line frequency -- not perfect anymore, but pretty good).
Walltime was easy to set (for DST buggery or power outage), too: Same knob, still no buttons. Same excellent acceleration ramps. Just start with an anticlockwise flick, and it's setting the clock instead of the timer.
(Screw it up by twisting it the wrong way on initial rotation? It didn't matter much because the cost of resetting the clock was very, very low and the action of it felt like a pleasant release from modern human interface chicanery)
---
Clock on present-day oven also works, but it's crap. Pick a mode with a button. Set digits by holding or tapping up or down buttons. Accept input digits by pressing another button.
But tapping always only goes in 1-minute steps, which sounds nice except: The debounce is bad and it misses rapid taps. And holding it sounds nice, except: It always overshoots, by a lot -- the acceleration ramps are, to put it as kindly as I can, sadistic.
Setting the clock is miserable. The fastest and least-annoying way to adjust for DST is to mash the button 60 times at the right cadence: Too fast, and it misses inputs.
Too slow and it takes long enough that the motivation is to try the sadistic button-hold acceleration again (which will be uniformly punished by sending it even further away from the target than where it started).
I'd put black tape over the display (like a VCR from the 1980s) and forget about it, but: In a curse of integration-at-every-expense, this display is also used to set the temperature for the oven and I need that function.
I like it, and maybe I’m log-brained after dealing with them for years, but I think the tick marks should compress as you go around the dial. The way it looks now, the distance from 4 to 5 is the same as 5 to 10, and it takes a second to figure out what’s going on with the tick marks.
What about removing the "0" label (which is implicit anyways) and having a label at 10sec instead. That would preserve the pattern that the last label is self-documenting as the increment interval.
I like this, but I want a timer with at least 3 timers in it, memory options. I have a digital one from AliExpress, which is quite OK, except the alarm sound is too faint and the memory button UX is awkward.
Kinda clever, not sure I understand why you want 25% of the dial dedicated to 0-60 seconds. In cooking nothing is really that precise to justify that
Indeed. For a dial microwave (the pinnacle of UX design IMO) 5-10 seconds is perfect for warming food, but as a kitchen 'egg timer' I unfortunately can't see much utility to small increments.
Hang on, literal egg timing (boiled eggs) requires exact minutes and varies according to how you want your yolk, which in my case also depends on what I am using it for.
But the precision is in the 0-60 second range only ...
I like it, but like the kitchen timer I built a while back with a rotary encoder knob, it doesn't run on batteries forever like most cheap timers. Maybe with AI help I could get that done though. (At least for a digital one, not sure how much power that physical dial uses.)
If you're not set on analog and want a countertop timer, just get one of these: https://www.thermoworks.com/products/extra-big-loud-timer (though probably on sale soon given the season). It's one of those products that just does exactly what it says on the tin: it's extra big (very easy to operate!) and extra loud (they do mean that one).
Though if you prefer a portable one you can stuff in your pocket they have that too, and it also does just what it says on the tin.
Add a voice recognition to set the timer would be nice!
This is, on the one hand, a very cool design, but on the other a sad indictment of more-buttons-is-better design in Western appliances. Go to Japan and most microwaves have two dials, one for power, one for time. 99.9% of the time you can get what you want with a twist of the time dial and be halfway through cooking/heating your food while the person with the keypad microwave is still trying to figure out which of the pre-Sumerian glyphs in dark grey on black keys against a black background is the one they need to press.
TIL I'm Japanese apparently
Why not the standard 1,2,5,10?
Probably because he wanted equidistant tick marks, and this way, each label is also the unit for the major ticks in the section that follow it.
Why is the wakeup feature needed?
It's a smart solution from someone who apparently doesn't do much cooking in the kitchen themselves:)
Microwaves... I personally find something else more annoying, the power output is often regulated by a very crude PWM - so basically if your magnetron is rated for 1 kW, "500W" is effectively 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, or 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off, 15 seconds on and 15 seconds off. Or whatever ratio the microwave controller uses under the hood.
That's fine if you need something to be in the microwave for a few minutes, but it absolutely sucks if you need something to be close to (or much less than) the period time... it's completely random and depending where the prior usage started, how much active time your ingredients experience.
Panasonic Inverter microwaves output continuously at the power level you specify.
For a number of years, I had a Panasonic inverter microwave. I found that it worked very well at its job of warming up food, like turning a frozen burrito from a cold brick into consistent-hot goopy shame, with no blowouts, and without having to do things like pause and flip it over.
It was programmable, too. 45 seconds on high, then 2 minutes at 50%? 45P5200S (where P is the Power button and S is Start).
I also found that nobody but me cared about any of that at all. Everyone else who ever used it always ran it at 100% power.
---
One of these days, I'll get another one that has variable power like this again. But it'll be a "flat bed" Toshiba, since the present lineup from Panasonic all includes spinning glass carousels and those have always been both stupid and unnecessary.
Like the author, I've also found there are no great kitchen timers. I've had some ovens in the past that do an OK job, but my current one is terrible. I've been using a clockwork one for the past few years, but it does have the noted shortcoming of only ringing once.
The quasi-logarithmic idea is a good one. I would buy a simple one that just has a dial. No button required. But I agree with the other commenter that the 0-60 part would be quite useless for a kitchen timer. Better to have more resolution in the commonly used 0-30 minute range.
My current favorite kitchen timer is a Japanese one I got online. Its got 5 buttons: start/stop, reset, and add 1/3/5 mins (so for example a 12 min timer would be 5,5,1,1,start)
love the clicks and sounds in the demo