What does it do?

Momentis is a digital clock that enables you to give a special moment a physical presence. It shows the years, months, days, hours, and minutes since (or to) a moment in time.

It is an ideal gift for a newborn, newlyweds, or really any momentous occasion. It comes in a luxurious giftbox, packaged in foam. Setup instructions are printed on the sleeve.

It connects to your WiFi network to get the current time from the internet, and has a web interface to configure the device.

When you have set a moment through the web interface, Momentis will determine if that date is in the future or in the past, and then calculate the time difference in years, months, days, hours and minutes, taking into account the amount of days in a month, timezones, daylight saving time, and leap years.

Why did I make it?

When my niece was born, I wanted to give a gift that would stay with her for the rest of her life, always showing her exactly how old she was. That first prototype had the date hardcoded in it, and used components that I had on hand at the time.

After getting many positive comments, I decided to develop the idea into a product.

What makes it special?

Designed for life

Momentis is designed to maximize its usable life. All it needs is a WiFi connection to get the current time. There are no logins to remember, no cloud subscriptions, no apps you need to install. Branding is kept to a minimum, even the box can be reused by just removing the foam insert.

Arduino compatible

Momentis uses a Wemos D1 mini based on the ESP8266 chip. The external USB port is actually the port of the d1 mini, which makes it very easy to upload your own firmware if you wish. If there is demand for this, I will release example code to drive the LED display. The actual firmware running doing the time calculations is not open source.

API

Momentis has a simple REST API that supports setting a moment and displaying arbitrary messages. Documentation will be provided if the demand warrants it.