I was just sitting at my desk doing work today when I remembered that I have to add chemicals to my hottub this weekend. Yes, I have a reminder set on my Google calendar and I'll get an alert when the time comes. That said, I'm not necessarily in a convenient place when that reminder comes. Wouldn't it be nice to put an unobtrusive device on my bathroom counter that will blink a red LED when something is past due and then let me push it to indicate that it has been compete? An app or website would serve as the primary interface, but the ability to have the reminder device in the place that you do the activity would be great.
The first thing that I do when I have "brilliant" ideas is to see if they've been done by somebody else. This one largely has via Droplet. They were quarter-sized little buttons that you could stick to things and you'd get a phone reminder that you needed to do something. Once you were done doing that something, you push the Droplet and it records that you have finished the task. Not quite exactly my idea, but quite close. The Droplet required a hub to be plugged into an outlet somewhere in your house. They claimed 100ft or so coverage. My guess is that it was using bluetooth LE to get the battery life up to anything useful.
Unfortunately, Droplet was a Kickstarter project that was raising money in the beginning of 2015. It's not clear that they got the product out the door. Their website (as of the writing of this post) was still up and looking reasonably modern. The shop link was dead, though. And I can't find an app that looks to be them. Sadly, I can't even find anybody on the internet talking about why or how they died. And only limited angry Kickstarter posts, given that the updates to the project are only for backers of the project. Social media updates stopped in November of 2015; the last updates on the Kickstarter website were in spring 2016. It seems reasonable to assume that it is dead.
If this review is the last word on the subject, the world is without a good system now. Potentially time to hack something together.
