The Ten-Year Dream on My Fridge: How AI Helped Me (Finally) Build My Family's Life Clock

I can’t remember when I first started dreaming of the “Life Clock.” It’s one of those ideas that probably flitted into my mind a decade ago – a simple, ambient display showing exactly how long each of us in the family has been on this journey of life, down to the second. A little memento mori, perhaps, but also a celebration, ticking away in the background of our daily lives. Like many such dreams, it got filed away under “someday.”

“Someday” got a little closer over four years ago when I purchased an Adafruit MagTag. For those unfamiliar, it’s a neat little gadget with an e-ink display and WiFi – perfect for a project like this. I unboxed it, probably admired its potential, and then… it joined the honorable society of “Things I’ll Get To When I Have Time.” It sat there, a silent promise of a project yet to be born, gathering not so much dust, but the invisible weight of unfulfilled intentions.

Life, as it does, kept rolling. Kids, work, household chores, family visits – the usual beautiful chaos. The MagTag waited. The dream of the Life Clock waited. I knew it was possible, but the thought of diving into firmware updates, wrestling with microcontroller libraries, and the inevitable debugging cycles, all while juggling a busy life, felt like a heavy lift. It was a project that seemed to demand a kind of monastic focus I rarely find myself with these days.

This wasn’t my first rodeo with AI transforming a challenging personal project into a manageable endeavor. In fact, my experience building an environmental monitor with an Adafruit CLUE board, detailed in my post “From Idea to IoT Data: Building an Environmental Monitor with Adafruit CLUE and Python”, had already cemented my confidence in this approach for IoT ventures. In that project, AI tools like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Roo-Code were instrumental in navigating CircuitPython and Python development, turning complex tasks into achievable steps. So, when the MagTag Life Clock idea resurfaced, leveraging AI assistants like Claude 4 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro wasn’t a tentative experiment, but a well-trodden path to accelerated development and creative problem-solving.

So, one recent afternoon, on a whim almost, I decided to pull the MagTag out. My mother was in town for the week, my daughter was playing nearby, the boys were around – hardly the quiet, dedicated time I once thought essential for a tech project. But this time, I had an ace up my sleeve. I opened Cursor, my development environment, and simply started talking to the AI.

I laid out the vision: the Life Clock, individual timers for each family member, wireless updates, the whole nine yards. What followed was, frankly, astonishing. With the AI’s assistance, a project that had loomed large in my “too hard” pile for years began to unfold with an almost absentminded ease.

“We need a plan,” I’d think, and the AI would help draft it. “What’s the latest bootloader for this MagTag?” A quick query, and the answer, along with links, would appear. “How do I best get the current time in CircuitPython and handle timezones?” Code snippets and explanations materialized.

We – and I say “we” because it truly felt like a collaboration – found the necessary CircuitPython libraries, sketched out the code structure, and started implementing. There were hiccups, of course. An early attempt at fetching time failed. A syntax error cropped up. The e-ink display stubbornly refused to refresh. But each time, instead of a frustrating trawl through forums or a painstaking line-by-line debug, it was a quick conversation: “Here’s the error, what do you think?” And the AI would offer suggestions, point out potential issues, and even draft the corrected code.

All this, while life continued around me. I was simultaneously watching over my daughter, hanging out with my sons, taking care of things around the house, and spending time with my mom. The focused, uninterrupted time I thought I needed? It turned out, with the right partner, it wasn’t the only way. This was multitasking a project into existence.

By the end of that single afternoon – an afternoon punctuated by a child’s laughter, household duties, and family conversations – the Life Clock was alive. The Adafruit MagTag, once a relic of good intentions, was now wirelessly connecting to the internet, fetching the precise time, and displaying, for me, for my wife, and for each of my children, exactly how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds we’d each been alive.

The ten-year dream? It’s now a reality, magnetically attached to our fridge. A quiet, e-ink testament to time’s passage, there for anyone in the family to inspect whenever they want.

Looking back, it reminds me a bit of my early days on Wall Street – being thrown into a new world, feeling like I had no idea what I was doing. What mattered then, and what mattered with this project, wasn’t knowing everything at the outset. It was about getting in the race, having the tenacity to keep going, and, crucially, having the right support. Back then, it was a tough boss who, in his own way, was testing and guiding. Today, it was the patient, knowledgeable assistance of AI.

It’s a small thing, a clock on a fridge. But it’s also a reminder that sometimes, the barriers to our long-held visions aren’t as insurmountable as they seem. Sometimes, all it takes is a new tool, a new approach, and a single afternoon to turn “someday” into “today.”

The Soundtrack to “Someday”

Just as AI helped transform my long-held vision into reality, I was curious to see if it could also capture the emotional journey of that transformation in music. Here’s an AI-generated piece that reflects the experience of finally building the Life Clock.