Desk Buddy A tiny robot that clips onto your laptop and keeps you in deep focus
What
A working smart object prototype.
Team
2 designers. CCA, 2026.
Built with
ESP32, OLED screen, buzzer, ultrasonic sensor.
Technique
Pomodoro: 25 minutes of focus, then a short break.
The problem
A text. An email. A notification you promise to ignore, or no reason at all, just the itch to scroll. One glance and the twenty minutes you set aside are gone.
The idea
The Pomodoro technique already works: 25 minutes of focus, a short break, repeat. We wanted to make it fun, so we gave it a body. A little buddy that sits on your laptop and keeps count with you.
The working prototype
Our own test run, sound on. Buddy sits on the laptop, the dashboard logs each session, and the face on the OLED changes as the session goes.
How it works
Four 25 minute sessions with breaks between them. Users never touch the device; three signals tell Buddy what is happening.
- 01
Start by voice
Say the word to Siri and a session begins. No app to open, no screen to unlock.
- 02
Pick up your phone and the timer freezes
The laptop camera notices you looking at your phone. The countdown stops and Buddy turns angry until you put it down.
- 03
Walk away and it knows
An ultrasonic sensor measures whether you are still at your desk.
- 04
Breaks are part of the loop
After each session the buzzer sounds, the face relaxes and the screen tells you to step away.
The moods
The whole interface is one face. Five expressions do the work of menus and text.
How we built it
A microcontroller, a small screen and a tangle of jumper wires on a breadboard. Four rounds got it working.
- 01
ESP32 and OLED, wired up
The first breadboard, and a tiny screen flickering to life.
- 02
A different OLED module
It never rendered cleanly. Dead end, so we went back.
- 03
A pair of eyes
The moment Buddy had a face, the idea clicked.
- 04
An ultrasonic sensor
Distance sensing, so Buddy knows when you are really there.
Building the mid fidelity prototype
The breadboard proved the idea. Now we are turning it into a real object: modelling a case, 3D printing it, and fitting the screen, board and battery inside, so Buddy can sit on a desk on its own.
Looking back
- 01
Arduino made us curious
Once the first screen lit up, we kept asking what else it could do. A buzzer, a sensor, a face. Every small test opened up another idea, and playing with all those possibilities was the most fun part.
- 02
Our first time 3D printing
Neither of us had printed anything before. What we made was simple, but modelling a part, printing it and watching it come off the machine was new and exciting.
- 03
The process was the lesson
We did not build anything complex. But trying things, breaking them and trying again taught us more than a perfect plan would have.