While I loved the feeling of knowing that I could open and run anything on the MacBook Pro — aka a conventional laptop — the idea of moving solely to the efficient machine that is the iPad Pro was appealing for various reasons. Yet the question remained: how would I continue the work on side-projects, whether they be software or hardware? There is a lot of talk these days about how LumaFusion is real competition to Adobe Premiere, or that Affinity Photo has nothing to fear from desktop Photoshop. While I do spend some time with such creative apps, how am I supposed to maintain my personal webpage, write code for my Raspberry Pi, or create CAD models for 3D printing?

The answer is mostly through remote access. Fear not, dear reader, we’ll try to rely on tools that are native or at least feel native on the iPad Pro, not just cheap Teamviewer-ing. What started as just a 9 to 5 setup challenge, not the other way around, is now much more than that.

Note 1: This is merely a shoutout to great products I’m using daily and isn’t sponsored. The links are not affiliated either. I’ll try to provide different options as well as keep some focus on open-source software.

Note 2: The new iPad Air now features most of the laptop-like abilities of its Pro brother; therefore, I’ll only use the term “iPad” in the following. But bear in mind: the cheapest 2020 8th-gen iPad still has the old form-factor and a Lightning port, making it incompatible with some of the following.

External Monitor

I was lucky enough to have an LG Ultrafine 4K display in my possession for use with the MacBook Pro. These fancy displays, designed hand-in-hand with Apple, are compatible with both Thunderbolt devices like the MacBook and with standard USB-C devices like the iPad. However, you can’t use the same cable, so if you are to buy this one, make sure you’re using the one with an iPad label on it before returning it out of frustration!

I believe it’s common knowledge that you can’t just work out of a laptop form-factor all day without destroying your neck. Here the cheapest option would be to go with one of the pretty cool arm mounts specifically designed to put the iPad right in front of your eyes or just a pile of books. This allows the expensive pixels to get the amount of attention they deserve while also enabling instant video calling.

While an external monitor is really comfortable, one thing to note is the lack of *full* external monitor support with iPadOS at the time of writing (version 14.4). Connecting a USB-C display like the Ultrafine essentially triggers an AirPlay mirroring of the iPad’s screen and is therefore really not as satisfying as a standard laptop+display setup with an extended desktop for greater multitasking. Depending on its size and resolution, you’ll most likely end up with black bars around the mirrored video flux. It’s annoying even though you do get used to it. But there are ways around it.

The workaround is indeed in the ability of iOS apps to specify how an external monitor should be used. For instance, Netflix uses the iPad’s display for media controls while broadcasting the content onto the monitor. Luma Fusion has a mode for the video editor to stay on the iPad’s screen while live previewing on the monitor in full-screen.

And in a clever workaround, a popular app called Shiftscreen leverages these APIs to enable side-by-side web multitasking on the full external monitor, which is pretty convenient since nowadays a lot of work is actually happening within web apps like Google Docs or JIRA. On top of that, the app is still able to project the side-by-side browser on the external monitor even when it’s in Split Mode, therefore enabling another iOS app to be interacted with, such as a todo-list or direct messaging.

I have to say, it’s an excellent option for specific tasks, but after a while, I just learned to love the mirrored interface. Now I’m rarely spending my time in apps that provide full monitor support. App Switching via Cmd+Tab or the gestures is hugely satisfying, plus I don’t think it has brought my productivity down at all. In fact, it might have improved my focus on the task at hand.

External Keyboard and Mouse/Trackpad

Speaking of hitting keys and performing gestures. While the iPad itself has an incredibly mobile form-factor, we owe ourselves a decent desk setup. After all, we are turning it into our personal workstation.

On the high-end of the spectrum lies the incredible Magic Keyboard for iPad. It’s heavy. It’s stupidly expensive. But it’s my best purchase of the year. It effectively turns the iPad into a laptop with its form-factor, Trackpad, and additional charging port. On top of that, the keys have nothing to envy from a real Magic Keyboard. It’s so good it made it to my main desk. Thankfully though, Logitech came up with a much more affordable option, the Folio Touch for 11" iPads.

Now even cheaper options are possible, such as just getting a good regular Bluetooth keyboard to complete a stand mount like the mechanical Keychron K2, as well as a mouse—I can’t not recommend the MX Master series, but the Pebble, for something on the pocketable side, is excellent and very affordable in the K380 combo. The external Magic Trackpad 2 is incredible to use and works well with iPadOS but is, granted, on the expensive edge of the spectrum of pointing devices.

Update: After quite some time with the Magic Keyboard for iPad on my desk, I revised the setup, with the tablet laying flat under the monitor to quickly take handwritten notes or drawings, with the Keychron K2 + Magic Trackpad 2 as input devices. We’ll see if it sticks!

Software Dev: Remote Server and Native Apps

Let’s get into some real engineering tools. As I’m sure you already know, there’s no walled garden like iOS/iPadOS. Apps are fully contained, Files is some kind of file explorer yet remains very limited, and firing up a local command line is pure fantasy.

How the heck do we write and run our beloved code, Pierre? 💁

As is so common these days, the trick is in the cloud. While it comes with its drawbacks such as with spotty connections, offloading the work to a remote, safe, always-accessible machine has some nice things going for it. A hosted instance can be fired up in a matter of minutes these days. To stay somewhat minimalist, I chose to keep an old laptop plugged in inside a closet, but there are many options out there.

There’s essentially two solutions that work for me at the moment: Visual Studio Code in the browser, which can be achieved in various ways; or a native SSH client app such as Termius or Blink Shell. The former is a cross-platform cloud SSH/Mosh service that has really good iPad support. Its main downside is the lack of a full external monitor integration, as mentioned earlier. Blink Shell features it, and it works quite well. Picture that clean tmux/vim session on a 4K monitor, at the cost of losing mouse support, though.

For a proper IDE, there are ways to run the undisputed leader of the last years—VS Code — in Safari. I personally only fire it up for refactoring and large Git diffs. I’m happy with terminal-only work otherwise. code-server is a project that does exactly that, and at the time of writing comes with a Beta parameter --link that does all the hard work of securing the connection. A one line command to install on various hosts, and another one-liner for port-forwarding to start the remote access. For more details on the setup with more technical bits, you can check out my Notion project page.

The big downside here is the lack of scrolling support. Lucky for me, I’m navigating keyboard-only with the help of the Vim extension (Colemak version), but it’s a real barrier to entry. It’s related to a bug in the web engine. Nonetheless, there are a few hosted solutions with the same problem, such as Stackblitz and GitHub Codespaces—which both get honourable mentions yet aren’t open source—so I’m confident that issue might get solved soon.

Update: the scrolling issue is fixed as of iPadOS 14.5 Beta 1, which requires enrolling here. This means more people will be able to enjoy a proper coding experience on the iPad, and is really good news.

The example below shows VS Code running in Safari for iPad. It would be a great use case for Shiftscreen, which could have both VS Code and whatever docs on the side for a true multitasking experience on an external display.

Side note: there is no such thing as a system clipboard manager on iPadOS, which is quite inconvenient when coming from other desktop platforms. While there are various paid solutions that offer cloud clipboard syncing and beyond, the non-iPad-optimized Clipboard++ brought me exactly what I needed: a way to automatically save my Cmd+Cs so I don’t have to worry about overwriting the system buffer. Neat!

Software Dev (Bonus): Local Raspberry Pi

The folks for whom a cloud connection isn’t an option can still hope: the most recent iteration of the sweet Raspberry Pi comes with a USB-C power and data port. Hence it’spossible to both run it and give it ethernet access from the iPad with one cable.

This enables a lot of possibilities, including local SSH, code-server-ing and access to the Desktop Environment. I have yet to test this, but there are plenty of guides out there, notably one from the very official MagPi.

A great way to make sure some coding work gets done when we get to travel again ✈️

Hardware Dev: Remote Server and Remote Desktop

Here comes the harder part: hardware (easy).

To put it bluntly, there’s no SSHing into Computer Aided Design software. There’s no way of vim-editing a SolidWorks file. OpenSCAD might be an exception to these statements, yet it’s most definitely niche.

Two options I have explored:

• use some kind of Remote Desktop software to access our closet computer/server and run the software remotely;
• choose a web-based CAD software.

The first option could apply to a broad range of software beyond just CAD. The real bottleneck here is the quality of the iPad app. I’ve gone through many of the free options à la TeamViewer or Chrome Remote Desktop. But none provided mandatory things for my use case like full mouse buttons support (including click-and-drag with the wheel, for instance). Jumping into more premium territory, Splashtop remains free for personal and same-network use and has a great iPad app, but has a monthly fee for real remote access. The one that ended up meeting all my needs was the $19.99 Jump Destkop. With its outdated app icon and steep price tag, this was clearly not my first choice. But their Fluid Remote Desktop protocol for Windows and macOS has just been a very smooth experience. It works wonders with external mice and Trackpads, and it has full external monitor support on the iPad with automatic resolution matching. On top of that, it supports VNC (even over SSH tunnels) to connect to Linux hosts such as a (local) Raspberry Pi or other instances I use for work on a daily basis.

And it has stood the test of time: the whole design for my GeeXY 3D printer project was created through Jump Desktop on the iPad. No regrets so far!

The second option lies in the cloud web-based CAD system: Onshape. I’ve been bullish on their system through college since they’ve nailed quite a lot of CAD aspects that are out of this article’s scope. While I do use it from time to time on Safari on the iPad, I’ve been loyal to the great open-source FreeCAD lately because I’m also using it at work (it even runs on Linux!).

A life of workarounds? Most definitely.

Coming from macOS, the holy grail for many curious people who care about a furnished software library, first-class terminal experience and compatibility, the fully mobile iPad path is definitely not the easiest path to meet our specific needs as developers or engineers.

But the joy, I mean it, the joy, that this iPad experience brings is what got me up for the challenge and kept me on the hook for side-projects as well as working from home. At the moment, there’s no going back, and it’s become clear that Intel chips are not missed at all, by me or many people with the new M1 Macs.

One curious thing I noticed in the iPadOS environment is a widespread old-school pay-once/use-forever business model, which offers quite a shelter from our subscription-based world. Shiftscreen was $3.99, Jump $19.99, and LumaFusion $29.99. It’s now paid for. Let’s enjoy the ride.

This story was originally published on Unicorn Utterances, a place to learn about all sorts of programming topics. Go check out other articles!

Style aside, this phone had another promise: extended functionalities via modules. Making use of two pins on the back of the phone for power, and wireless connectivity for data, the Essential Phone came out with only one accessory, a 360 Camera.

But while an Essential Dock what long-promised, it never came out to the public. The phone being incompatible with Qi wireless charging due to its ceramic back, there is only one option left for getting it to charge in a more convenient manner than with a USB-C cable: DIY.

TL;DR + Prefer things in motion? 📹 YouTube Video

0. User Requirements

Spending most of my days at my desk, like many people, I like to have my phone charging to when I leave, I actually have enough battery for everything and anything. Having it in a standing position also allows for quick reading of notifications. Finally, for some use cases like quick online banking, access to the fingerprint is mandatory, so let’s try to keep it in reach.

Formally, let’s write the following requirements. The phone should be:

1. Charging without having to plug a cable;
2. Standing so information and notifications are delivered seamlessly;
3. Leaving the fingerprint scanner accessible.

1. The Prototype: our own Printed Circuit Board

1.1 Reverse-engineering the accessory pins

From the Essential specifications, one can learn that communications with accessories such as the 360 Camera are handled by a system in which:

• data flows from the phone to accessories wirelessly;
• power is drawn from the pins themselves by the accessories.

However, it turns out these power pins are functioning both ways: by applying a 5V current on them, the phone shows immediately wireless charging graphics and starts charging, as pictured below.

1.2 Pogo-pins and USB-C for convenience: Autodesk Eagle

While holding a cable to the pins it totally fine the previous picture and some subsequent testing, we need to find some way to properly connect these pins to our intended product.

It turns out that in electronics, spring-enabled conductive bars are used to easily test circuits, and answer the cute name of “pogo-pins.” All credits go to my fellow Essentialist u/Untribium for finding this solution.

The aim is to have these mounted on a solid board, and connected to a source of power. And while the Essential Phone isn’t the latest phone in town, it featured a modern USB-C port and came with the corresponding cable. Let’s be consistent with that by using the same port and therefore allow the OEM cable to be used for our wireless charging stand.

And in the end, the easy answer to hold and connect both the pogo-pins and the USB-C port is a Printed Circuit Board. Technology is evolving really fast, and designing custom PCBs is no more reserved for highly-skilled electrical engineers. Let’s hop onto Autodesk Eagle, a free-as-in-free-lunch cross-platform PCB design tool to do just that!

You can find all the source files that you can freely edit to get you started in the Thingiverse post (alternative Google Drive link).

There is one topic on which we can expand a little: these two resistors in the middle of our simple board. When we did the first test with the brutalized USB cable, we only had two wires. What is the deal here? Compatibility! USB-C cables are using a new protocol called Power Delivery in order to deliver, well, power. For the charger to know how much power to actually send, this protocol is using a so-called C-C channel (additional wires), on which the receiver specifies the maximum amount of power it should receive. By putting two 5.1K resistors on that channel, we explicitly require currents lower than 3A (ie. 15W on 5V connections).

1.3 Manufacturing on JLCPCB

Designing is one thing, but how do one Print these ugly Circuit Boards, uh?

Well, this is evolving too. There was a time when minimal orders were 20,000 pieces and prices for small-batch manufacturing to the roof. But automation found a solution to that, and today’s leader for Printing-as-a-Service is a Chinese company named JLCPCB. For $2, you can get 5 boards printed and shipped to you in a matter of days.

On Eagle, you have to click on Manufacturing > CAM… > Process Job. Then you can head to jlpcb.com and upload the .zip file just generated containing your Gerber files.

The order process is incredibly simple, and you can then follow each step of the manufacturing, and wait for the 5 boards to reach your mailbox. Amazing stuff.

1.4 Soldering and final tests

For the parts, we ordered for 5 boards at two different places:

• The 5.1K resistors and 6-pin USB-C ports on JLCPCB’s sister website;
• The PGTH400 pogo-pins on Aliexpress.

Now that everything is in place, we can proceed to the soldering, which is a bit tedious for the port but totally doable at home without proper experience and inexpensive $10 irons.

The process is:

• soldering the two resistors on each side
• soldering the 6 pins of the USB-C port to the board
• soldering the two pogo pins from the back of the board

We can now test our custom board. Yay!

2. Creating the Stand: 3D Printing

2.1 Objectives

Now that we have solid foundations for the electrical wiring, let’s focus on designing a great stand. In addition to our global User Requirements, let’s have the following design objectives. Let’s aim for:

• a low-profile design;
• a robust good connection with the pins on the board.

While the first one is a matter of taste and CAD skills, the second one can be expanded a bit. In order to keep the accessories such as the 360 Camera in place, Essential added (at least) 2 magnets next to the pins. Let’s make use of them in the design of the stand to allow for the phone to stay well-aligned on its own (again all credits to u/Untribium).

2.2 Design

The great thing about Autodesk Eagle as a PCB design tool is its integration with Autodesk Fusion 360, a free-for-personal use cloud CAD platform. In three clicks, the board is exported as a 3D model right in a Fusion project, from which we can design thereafter.

We settled on the following 1-part design for our wireless charging stand.

The CAD source files are available on this public Fusion project link.

2.3 Print!

After simple slicing with Ultimaker Cura, we obtain the following printable blueprint, with the removable supports option enabled.

The print took 7h30 to complete on a Creality Ender 3 printer, using PLA as material (the simplest and cleanest).

3. Going Further: a Product?

Reaching this point feels really good. We completed the realization of a full-blown prototype, that fulfills each and every one of our User Requirements. Still, could we go a bit further and think about it from a product perspective?

As a member of the very active and dedicated Essential community, the need for a wireless charger has been voiced for a long time. The reasons for this are multiple, from the convenience standpoint of a quick way of charging to the specific use case of listening to USB-C audio while charging.

However, as of now the phone is officially unsupported, and the community is transitioning to new devices, so we would be definitely late to the game. Nonetheless, building a very affordable solution could work, and we clearly see that aiming at prices like $9.99 would totally be doable using a cheap plastic casing. It would be also very interesting to go the high-quality side and build a fancy Aluminium casing, that would match with the premium Titanium+Ceramic materials of our beloved PH1.

My fellow Essentialist u/Untribium is manually producing and selling multiple versions of a wireless charger using the same approach, that you can check out at https://www.untribium.com/.

Wrapping Up

• Using Autodesk Eagle to create a custom circuit board
• Sync with Autodesk Fusion to design a 3D-printable stand/casing

Creating a Wireless Charging Stand for the Essential Phone: Custom PCB and 3D Printing was originally published in Zero to Product! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been very common lately to see cheaper and cheaper electrical kettles that do temperature management. They work wonders, and I would really like to have one.

But there’s one problem. What if I don’t want to throw mine away?

Yes, I could try to sell it. Yes, I could forget about the $30 it cost me three years ago. Yes, I could throw it away and forget about the environmental take it had when produced, and will have when destroyed.

Better question: could we, starting from zero, create a product to actually make it smart, and get the temperature-managing electrical kettle to beg for it? Let’s call it, Kettle Manager!

TL;DR + Prefer things in motion? 📹 YouTube Video

0. User Requirements

A great way to start would be to put together a list of the cool stuff the product should allow for:

1. Boiling water to the specific temperature,
2. Remaining non-intrusive and non-breaking.

Let’s dive in. Requirement 1 is the primary purpose of the product, nothing to explain here. Requirement 2 is maybe a stretch at this point, but I need to mention it. I don’t want to mess with my kettle, and neither do you. It needs to be completely operable on its own. Let the poor creature live, please!

1. The Prototype: Raspberry Pi and Machine Learning

1.0. Components

We start with a Raspberry Pi 2, which was laying around. It could very well be any Raspberry Pi, provided it has WiFi support (here with a cheap dongle).

We’ve used mini-breadboards (yellow, green, red, and blue) for specific components, which is nice for visual organization.

The key component is the temperature sensor, wired to the green breadboard, which is a waterproof cable version of the common DS18B20, easy to use with its three wires with DIY boards like the Pi.

In order to handle user interaction, an LCD display, wired to the yellow breadboard, has been used (because it was laying around again, DIY spirit folks). It is controlled by a rotary encoder, a small electronic component that allows for scrolling and clicking, handy for menu navigation.

The last step is the blue relay, wired to the blue breadboard, shown in a reused (which was laying around) 3D-printed enclosure, controlling a vandalized grounded extension cord (orange), to which we plug the kettle.

The red breadboard handles power inputs, namely the 3.3V used for all modules except the display (which uses 5V).

Summary of our prototype’s Bill of Materials (BOM):

1x Raspberry Pi (WiFi-enabled)

1x Micro SD

4x mini-breadboard

1x waterproof temperature sensor DS18B20

1x 4.7K resistor

A few jumper wires

1x “blue relay” SRD-05VDC-SL-C

1x grounded extension cord

1.1. Preparing our Compute Module

Let’s first install the firmware of the Raspberry Pi. Grab the new automated Raspberry Pi Imager from the official website (available for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu). We’ll use RASPBIAN PI OS as the Operating System, and our SD Card was GENERIC MASSST… (you should check the size of it so you don’t end up writing on your hard drive! It’s probably < 100GB). Click WRITE.

Before removing it from your computer, we’ll do the WiFi setup there, so we won’t have to plug it to a display and a keyboard at first boot.

Note: these aren’t totally necessary, you could also use a keyboard and an HDMI display to start the system and graphically configure it.

Let’s perform two useful steps after opening your SD Card (named boot);

• Create a text file without any extension named ssh at the root of the directory;

• Create a text file without any extension named wpa_supplicant, where we’ll write down your WiFi network security settings, replacing MY_NETWORK_NAME and MY_NETWORK_PASSWORD with their respective values, in quotes, as follows.

country=us
update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
 scan_ssid=1
 ssid="MY_NETWORK_NAME"
 psk="MY_NETWORK_PASSWORD"
}

Now that the SD Card has been prepared, it can be inserted in the dedicated slot of the Raspberry Pi, as per the following figure. You should also connect your WiFi dongle for old models that don’t have it built-in (3+ do), as well as a micro USB power supply (you should check that the current provided is enough, aiming for 2A to ensure the best performance).

The card should boot (with the small lights blinking), and after a while, it should be connected to your Wi-Fi network and should be accessible at the address octopi.local (if not, you should look for its IP address of the form 192.168.X.X on your router's wireless preferences) and the following commands.

$ ssh -p raspberry pi@raspberrypi.local
$ git clone https://github.com/pierremtb/kettle-manager
$ cd kettle-manager
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

While the first command connects you to the Pi, with the default password raspberry , the second one clones the source code for the whole product and gets in the directory with the third one. Finally, pre-defined Python 3 dependencies are installed.

We're now fully prepared to look closer at each Module.

1.2. Reading data with the Temperature Module

The temperature sensor chosen for this application is a generic one, with elegant name DS18B20. There exist multiple form-factors for it, and in our application, a waterproof cable-style one is what we need since we’ll dip in the kettle for calibration purposes. Here’s how our version looks.

• Yellow: ground wire
• Red: power wire, requires 3.3V
• Green: data wire

Compared to other simpler devices that may only require to read the LOW/HIGH state of GPIO pins, the thermometer sensor needs to send data through the 1-wire protocol, sending a digital temperature value.

We need to leverage the “1-wire” interface on the Raspberry Pi, which will happen on the BCM 4 port, as depicted on the diagram as a blue wire. We use an additional mini-breadboard here to prepare power lines so that other modules will be allowed to run afterward. We see on the mini-breadboard on the right (green on the photos) the 4.7K resistor connecting the 3.3V red wire to the blue data wire lire, linked to the output of the sensor. Here is a shot at the wiring.

A specific Python class was written to control the temperature sensor. You don’t have to understand the whole thing, but it goes as follows:

• At the class initialization, we run two modprobe commands to enable some of the specific 1-wire mode made for this kind of sensor. We then look for a weirdly named directory with glob() in /sys/bus/w1/devices and store it, since it will be the storage location of our temperature;
• When a reading is requested, we open this directory and make conversions to return a proper reading.

1.3. Showing information with the Display Module

Having the temperature read by the system is nice, but being able to show it is necessary. We make use of a regular 16x2 LCD display, which can be directly controlled by the Raspberry Pi GPIOs without any interface, although it needs a lot of wires.

It’s noteworthy that some of these displays come with an I2C interface and hence require only 4 wires. My second one did so I updated the repository accordingly, but I’ll keep the scripts here untouched.

This module isn’t using the 3.3V power (red) breadboard, because unlike all other components, this display requires 5V. We’ll create two power lines directly on the dedicated (yellow) breadboard, as well as an additional resistor line, which will control display contrast.

Ok, let’s jump in the code. This display class actually includes code to create and manage the small user menu, hence its extensive length. However, without diving in too much, let’s understand the main components:

• We recognize the GPIO pin numbers defined as constant at the top of the file, with RS, E, and DB being the ones controlling the display as defined in the diagram above, as well as POWER for the Switch Module, which we’ll go through later on.
• __init__ is called to construct the class and sets up the different modules that will be used, namely the Temperature Module (temperature), the Button Module (button), the Switch Module (switch) and the Server Module (model). These last four modules will be detailed in later sections.
• init_menu creates the different sections and subsections of the menu, that we create reusing code from the library RpiLCDMenu (fork for I2C)
• The rest of the methods are listeners for evens of this menu and are pretty straightforward.

1.4 User Interaction with the Button Module

Designing a system that has any kind of interaction with a human being is always a compromise between accessibility and the least number of subsystems (buttons, switches, wheels, etc.). In this case, a Rotary Encoder is exactly what we need to both scroll through the options of the menu, and click to select. It is something one can find paired to the same type of display, such as in low-end 3D printers.

As it is displayed on the diagram, connecting this component is straightforward: it needs three data pins, for the actions of rotating clockwise, anti-clockwise and pressing, as well as the two power pins.

For this Button Module, nothing much actually happens in the code, since there's readily available Python package named after its codename, ky040, installed earlier as part of the dependencies.

We can see on top constants defining the GPIO pins used for connecting, namely 5 (green cable), 6 (yellow cable), 13 (blue cable).

1.5 Completing the loop: the Switch Module

Now comes the dangerous section ⚠️: controlling real electricity. Our electric kettle of interest needs 110V of voltage, and it’s not something you want your body to experience (these relays can handle European voltage as well). Make sure to always have everything unplugged from the wall when doing any modifications.

Blue relays are a cheap and efficient solution to make an extension cord controlled by our Raspberry Pi since they provide a 1-pin interface (IN), alongside the usual power pins (VCC and GND).

One can note that on the real current side, there are three inputs, while we only need two to make the “circuit” of the kettle open, either the ground in the extension cord or the positive wire. It’s due to the two different choices that are offered to us:

• Normally open: if there’s no current applied to the IN pin, the current will not flow between the two inputs;
• Normally closed: if there's no current applied to the IN pin, the current will flow between the two inputs.

For both security reasons and practical purposes in our intent, we want to use the Normally closed state. We cracked open a grounded extension cord for this and screwed the two wire-sections in as on the following picture.

However, it’s not possible to correctly control the switch by directly wiring the IN pin to a GPIO pin of the Raspberry Pi as one would expect, because the voltage provided isn’t high enough to fully reach the threshold. A workaround involves an NPN transistor controlling a full 3.3V power line drawn from the Pi, which will trigger the threshold, yet it will be the NPN that will be controlled by the GPIO.

The code for this Switch Module is dead simple, just a matter of turning on and off one GPIO pin, as follows.

1.6 Predicting the boiling time: intelligent cloud software

Keeping our kettle unharmed and able to work on its own is our top priority in this project. There could have been multiple ways in which a temperature sensor could have been used to determine the boiling time:

1. by having it directly inside the kettle at all times (it’s waterproof after all);
2. by having it stuck on the metal side of the kettle, and by finding a way to account for the temperature difference between the inside and outside.

However, both of these approaches come with the caveat of preventing the kettle from working normally. Indeed, 1. would require us to put the sensor in and out each time—or find a way to route it permanently but alterations would need to be made on the kettle side, plus I wouldn’t be comfortable with drinking boiled water with a cheap plastic-covered sensor in it. And 2. would prevent the hot kettle from being taken away to the coffee table, for instance, losing the original flexibility of the dumb but no-so-dumb kettle.

This is why we chose to go for 3., which is:

3. by having it directly inside the kettle once in a while for calibration purposes

If we build a statistical model of the temperature with respect to the boiling time, it’s possible to change the control process in an offline/online way:

• We enforce an upfront “calibration” step, that would record a cold-water-to-boiling-water transition, and train a model;
• At normal use time, the user chooses a target temperature, and the model provides the corresponding boiling time.

While there would be plenty of curve-fitting methods to choose from, a fun exploration that I wanted to make was to use a Neural-Network regression for this problem. Provided the network deep enough, with the help of an activation function, it can approximate virtually any function, and in our case, our function of the target temperature.

Training a Neural Network, even a simple one, is a task a bit too expensive for a Raspberry Pi. Yet, one of the most widespread Deep Learning library, TensorFlow, has something exactly made for this kind of scenario: TensorFlow Lite, a module able to run already-trained models, and is aimed especially at IoT devices such as the Raspberry Pi.

The idea is simple: we offload the computational cost of the model training to a server, after each calibration, and our Raspberry Pi would be just fetching the trained model and evaluating it for new target temperatures.

Here is our small Neural Network model, defined server-side with the regular TensorFlow library. We see that one hidden layer of 64 neurons is used (#15), with a ReLu nonlinearity. The model is trained with Adam optimizer (#19). It’s a very standard setup.

We make use of a simple API set up to make this model accessible on the server, shown as follows. The two important methods are:

• post_data , used to send calibration data to train the model;
• get_model , used to retrieve a TensorFlow Lite-converted version of the model, to be used locally by the Raspberry Pi.

This can be set up in minutes on cloud machine providers like AWS or GCP, and both have a free tier to get you started. For instance on AWS LightSail:

Once created, you can use the unmissable “Connect using SSH” button that will open a command line on the server, in which you need to run the following commands.

$ git clone https://github.com/pierremtb/kettle-manager-server
$ cd kettle-manager-server
$ python3 -m pip install requirements.txt
$ python3 src/api.py

On the Raspberry Pi side, we just need one more class, which will define the few code snippets needed to communicate with the server. You’ll need to update BASE_URL accordingly

1.7 The program

Let’s now create a point of entry that will call all of these modules as follows, by convention as a main.py file shown below. We import the main modules–noting that Display encompasses others–and we create an infinite loop with a combination of the infamous while True and time.sleep.

In order to have it running at the board startup (ie. when we power the product), we create a launcher.sh that we execute in /etc/profile.

$ echo "cd kettle-manager//npython3 src/main.py" > ~/launcher.sh
$ sudo echo "sh launcher.sh &" > /etc/profile

Make sure to set headless autologin by running

sudo raspi-config

and choosingBoot Options > Desktop/CLI > Console Autologin > Finish.

2. Creating a Nice Casing: 3D Printing

Now that we have a fully working prototype, let’s think of a packaging that would allow it to be used in our kitchen, and not just in an electronics lab. While this used to be a challenge, on the knowledge, skills, and cost, both modern Computer-Aided Design software and inexpensive desktop 3D Printing solutions are making this possible for a hobbyist.

2.1 Objectives

They are twofold:

1. Have a minimal design impact
2. Fit all the prototype components

While the first one is very understandable, the second one is more of a direction we want to keep in this guide: yes, we want to aim toward a product, but we don’t want to sacrifice the modularity and reusability of the components. If the hobbyist decides that letting the water boil is fine and that those cables and electronics parts have better use elsewhere, then so be it!

2.2 Design

We settled on Autodesk Fusion 360 as our CAD platform, which is cloud-based, multi-purpose, and has a hobbyist free plan, bundling everything we need. It also integrates with Ultimaker Cura, the piece of software we will use to turn the model in a printer-language format.

On top of the objectives we have just discussed, we have to take into account the 3D Printing method used to obtain the parts in the end, which is Fused Deposition Modeling, which has its own constraints such as a 45 degrees maximal angle with the vertical axis for the overhang, if one wants to limit the use of supports.

We settled on a three-part casing, featuring slider joints removing the needs for fasteners. This is just a design decision, linked to the relatively static use of the product and simplicity-seeking.

Here is a Thingiverse post with the different ready-to-print STL models (alternative link), as well as the full Fusion 360 product with downloadable source files in various formats.

2.3 Print!

We used a Creality Ender 3 printer to manufacture these designs, which reliable and inexpensive for anyone new and even experienced with desktop 3D Printing.

The slicer Ultimaker Cura provides a great interface to transform the STL models to G-Code, the language that industrial machines and our printer speak. Some printers have their own slicing program on board though and can do this step automatically.

Here are the time-lapses.

After assembling everything, the design becomes a reality. At this point, it feels really good.

3. Going Further: a Product

Would this idea have a place on the market? Impossible to tell, ideas are cheap, it’s good executions that are worth millions.

3.1 The (not so) easy route

Considering that the total BOM (Bill Of Materials) was about $50 for the prototype, we could probably aim at a $9.99 or $19.99 price tag depending on the quality we aim at. It would require to re-engineer the whole system, from creating Printed-Circuit Boards (PCBs) to injection molds design, or much other Design For Manufacturing (DFM) constraints.

To be sustainable and avoid recurring costs, we would need to take the learning aspect back offline, which wouldn’t be that hard considering the simplicity of the modeling task. However, a simple device like this would be so easy to clone that we would see copycats appearing in a matter of weeks, to impossible prices like $4.99.

While being copied often means you’re onto something, you still need to be able to compete, and a mass-market dumb products won’t drive enough brand-awareness to balance it out.

3.2 The adventurous path

What if we were making more use of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) segment of our Kettle Manager? With it, it would be possible for the products to provide more value than just making boiling time predictions: for instance, tracking hydration would be an interesting direction.

A dedicated app and linked account could indeed record the water you put up for heating and provide you with useful feedback on how much you drink. To really be of value to the user, this data will be exportable to common health platforms that support hydration tracking, such as Apple Health, Samsung Health, or Runtastic.

Additional take: boiling water is mostly used for tea and coffee. Some people want the other way around sometimes, which would be limiting their intake of these delicious beverages. With a tagging system in the app, this product could really be onto something, and with proper marketing and valuable content posted online on health topics, a real brand could emerge.

Combining these aspects with the software and cloud infrastructure needed, this could very well sell at $49, just below the average temperature-controlled kettle, and focus solely on providing value to customers rather on the competition.

Wrapping up

• Defining user requirements and objectives
• Day-to-day application of Machine Learning techniques
• Using Autodesk Fusion 360 as a complete CAD/rendering platform
• Failing quickly and iterating accordingly with 3D Printing

Building a Kettle Manager: Raspberry Pi, Machine Learning, and 3D Printing was originally published in Zero to Product! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This morning was calm. This morning was different. One last figure to rerender, then the subtle click on a submit button. I’ve been putting in the hours, in and out of the lab, the only rest being the 20 hours a week I spend working for a tech startup. There’s so much other stuff I can’t wait to get to, projects I’ve had to pause for this big sprint to reach completion.

Completion has such a weird relationship with us. The journey means so much, yet we can’t help but crave that 100%-progress-bar moment. I guess that’s just being human, and keeping the shiny picture up is the only way to get in a task-busting mode, and figure out the most direct path to reach it.

As I’m finishing this cup of freshly-ground coffee, clarity is starting to fill my head again. The future is so exciting, I can’t wait. Forward, always is the motto I like to think that I share with Marvel’s Luke Cage and his beloved Pop’s.

It’s connection time. This last hypersonic train helped me reach my stopover. Next ticket’s in my pocket. Let’s climb on and enjoy the next journey.

Calm after Storm, the Emptiness of Completing was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve always liked words. Grammar, idioms, either in my native language or foreign. At school, I’d often spend hours refactoring every piece of writing I was assigned to. I didn’t really know why at the time.

After having read thousands of Medium stories since I discovered the platform in 2015, I finally came to the conclusion that I had to try someday. And that day was about 5 months ago.

My first two stories were actually quite different from the rest: one was an open motivational letter for an internship I was looking for, and the second, while surprisingly very well received, was nothing but a programming-related how-to.

What really started the whole thing was this idea I got about path and strategy to achieve success. I brought in an example from the bicycle racing world that I know very well, extending a lesson I had learned to a broader scope.

I was really, really proud of the story I had written. Hence I had only one thing in my head: getting it published in a Top Publication such as The Mission. Obviously, no big publication was to accept the first piece of an unknown guy, let alone The Mission, where they certainly receive dozens if not hundreds of submissions a day. I ended up publishing the story to a friend’s new publication, where it barely received 50 views. That sucked.

Huge Publication, Huge Desperation

That sucked because I had already wrapped my head around the fact that I’d be accepted to a Top Pub with a story like that, thousands of new followers would come and the claps number would skyrocket in no time.

No no, that didn’t happen.

The good thing is that I didn’t immediately quit. After a bunch of stories published by Be Yourself, I got accepted in The Startup. And incredibly enough, this story actually skyrocketed. It reached Medium Digest of many people, scored 3K Views on the next day, and has now more than 10K.

Wow. I was thriving. I finally got a piece of my work to reach a wide audience.

The first thing that came to my mind: this has everything to do with the 400K+ following that The Startup holds. Next thought: I will submit all my subsequent stories to it! I will gain more followers each time, leading to more audience, leading to FAAAAME.

Well. I’m afraid a figure will be better than words to describe what actually happened…

I had written the second story about entrepreneurship at the same time as the first one. I really believed that the former would perform better, because the latter was much simpler, and took much much less time to write.

How wrong was I. And the third one, well. I guess saying that it crashed is a little bit optimist. We’re talking about a 400K+ following. DAMN.

Quite obviously, Publications are just a way of reaching a broader audience, of getting the story out for more people to see. Yet I learned the hard way that it didn’t remove at all the need for providing value.

Because newcomers get it wrong.

Eloquency Might Be Fancy

The point is, I don’t even know if I prefer reading well-written, opinionated articles, or much more basic listicles that provide instant understanding and progress, from which you immediately come out with ideas on how to improve a certain domain.

What I know though, is that I really like to write stories that are different from the rest. Providing insights on new topics.

And I’m afraid this is exactly what got my two subsequent stories in The Startup to take off that bad, to speak gently. Similarly, the story I wrote for The Post-Grad Survival Guide didn’t reach many people as well.

Same style, same issues.

Yet it doesn’t bring claps.

Tricks Bring Hits

This is precisely in this context that I wrote the story right before this one.

I had already started putting the pieces together and began to understand that if I really wanted to broaden my audience, there was only one way.

Right before falling asleep one night, I came with the idea of my first listicle of the sort. I carefully detailed some habits I had committed to that made a difference in a quite long post, relatively to my usual ones. I worked a lot on it, and I was quite proud of it when submitting to The Startup.

8 Killer Habits That Made Last Month So Productive

Unsurprisingly, this story was a success. A success for me obviously.

The very notion of success should always be defined relatively and not absolutely. It’s about what we care for, our values, our goals, but not other people thoughts.

My best performing stories are tricks. Just like the most clapped at Beyourself was. Not written in a fancy way, cornering a fancy topic with a fancy new perspective. This didn’t work for me.

Of course, it has something to do with the simple fact that blogging is a very new thing to me, therefore the style can’t possibly be anything more than average.

Yet that same average style has proven to work for content that provides instant value.

Because it’s all most readers want.

In the meantime, I should probably care less about all these stats, just like Tom Kuegler explained in a recent story. This is not what brought me here in the first place. So why should it be the most important thing right now?

ProWritingAid is a powerful suite of over 20 different writing and editing tools. Copy your draft into their online editor and check grammar, sentence flow, overused words, and more. Try it for free!

But Providing Value was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wow. What a month it’s been.

I had planned high goals to achieve for me. But I managed to do even more. I’m almost done with a small Android app that I started to practice new skills, read two books, continued my quest for learning Mandarin Chinese, finished the new version of my portfolio, and gave a lot of thoughts to a book-notes project that I decided not to pursue — yet thinking about it was pretty cool.

This may sound like nothing, but I’m very happy about it. As always, what matters the most isn’t the end result, but the journey. And it has been made quite easier thanks to a bunch of new habits that I had committed to recently, thus I figured they would be worth sharing.

#1 Being a Sleeping Machine

Throughout my first three college years, I’ve been a night owl.

There is no problem with being a night owl. Except if you have to wake up early to go to work/university/something you have to do.

I used to live by the “I can sleep when I die” motto.

Working on my stuff on late nights. Hardly waking up 5 hours later saying, “NEVER AGAIN”. Powering through the workday. Promising myself to go to bed early. Suddenly regaining fake full alertness at night time. Repeating.

Is it good for my health? No.
Is it good for my productivity, in both my work and my projects? No.
WHY THE HELL AM I STILL DOING IT THEN.

Fortunately, I stopped before the end of 2017.

How?

What matters is having enough sleep, every day.

Enough sleep highly depends on the individual. Nothing you can read about what others do can help. I’ve found out that 7h works perfectly for me. I shouldn’t have said that. Find yours.

Every day is nothing else but discipline. This is the part that matters the most. Find the right time to go to bed and wake up. Repeat.

#2 Waking Up Early To Start With What Matters

The most productive hours of our days are right after waking up. This is a fact.

I feel like I’ve always wanted to switch my usual timetable, and doing what I want to do in the morning, before going to work.

Because I knew I would be more productive. I knew it would work out.

Yet I’ve managed to always find a reason not to start. Until a few months ago.

I know have a 2-hour block that I can dedicate to whatever I want before my day actually starts. How great is this?

How?

When you become a sleeping machine, nothing is stopping you to move the sleeping block you’ve created.

Just gradually change your established sleep block.

15 min by 15 min, till you reach your target.

#3 Using Time-Blocking For Your Life

Speaking of blocks.

I used to work on my projects when I had time, not planned, just when I felt like it and could. Sadly it’s really easy to get distracted by life, or wonder if it’s the right moment for doing it — Pierre, you know that you still have to finish that school report for tomorrow, right?. I often ended up half working and going to bed (very) late.

I’m an avid user of Todoist, one of the most famous todo-list services around. It has helped me organizing pretty much everything in my life for a year now.

But there is one important thing it doesn’t handle: durations.

One month ago, I’ve read about the concept of Time-Blocking.

Most people use it at work. But why should we limit its powerfulness, and not extending it to our entire life?

My new favorite idiom: throwing blocks at a project.

How?

What triggered the shift on my end was the fresh redesign of Google Calendar Web. Wasn’t the new interface appealing to my eyes, I would have certainly let this powerful tool alone. But I wanted to build something with it.

The tool used doesn’t matter, really.

They are two important things to remember when setting time blocks:

• Allowing for breaks when necessary: you’ll always have this email to answer or that other thing to take care of. 15 min works pretty well for me.
• Throwing away the plan when needed: choose a tool that allows easy refactoring. It’s perfectly fine to let the present complications disturb the pixel-perfect calendar. What matters is reacting promptly and adapting.

“Make the plan. Execute the plan. Expect the plan to go off the rails. Throw away the plan.”
 — Leonard Snart, The Flash

As I’m just an intern at the moment, I haven’t set any detailed block for the workday. Mostly because I only got one project that I have to work on, and my todo-list is more than enough for my planning needs. Speaking of todo-lists, Todoist has a nifty 2-way integration in Google Calendar, which pushes the whole system to a higher ground, allowing to have a great overview.

#4 Constantly Jumping Between Projects

I guess common sense is teaching us that staying focused is what matters the most in terms of rapid project completion and productivity.

However, I’ve come to understand that it doesn’t really work with me. I find it hard to know when I’ll be productive on a specified project.

What I know for sure is that I can get incredibly productive when I enter the so-called flow state, when the clock suddenly turns into a fan and everything else but the project freezes.

How?

By NOT strangling your mind to focus on the specific area you wanted to.

But rather letting it dive into another project or area that may end up being much more valuable than the former.

To quote Tobias van Schneider in a story about productivity:

“Repeat after me: I do not have to finish a project before I move on to the next one.”

I use to keep track of my project ideas in a list named Upcoming Sides, that I regularly update to match with the new areas I’d like to explore or the ones that no longer excite me. I often review it side-by-side with my Life Goals list, in order to make sure that I stay on the right track.

#5 Exercising At The Worst Time

This is probably the most interesting thing I’ve found out last month.

As a Top-25 U23 mountain bike rider in France, there is no way around avoiding my daily workout. While it can be really hard sometimes, exercising is certainly one of the most important things the human body needs, and it is known that it can have a drastic impact on productivity.

Since I used to hit the gym — yes gym because my bike is on the other side of the planet till I return home— every day during the evening, about 1h30 after coming back from work. During this gap, I often had problems focusing, and always had others things to do than the ones I had planned. At this point of the day, the only things you want to do are laying down, eating junk food and consuming pointless content that falls in front of your eyes, such as social media.

From my experience, this is one of the hardest times to get back to what needs to be done on your todo-list, such as reading this great book your colleague told you about or perfecting that skill of yours.

On the other hand, every time I come back from the gym, my head is cleared. At rest. Full of energy. Ready to take over the world.

How?

That’s when the refactoring idea came: moving the gym block right after work.

When it sucks the most.

And the outcome was even better than expected. Instead of benefiting from this energy gain only one hour before bed, I am now able to extend it through the whole evening.

#6 Journaling

I never thought I’d journal.
Why on earth would I need to spend time on this? Journaling is for children.

Yay. How wrong I was.

Journaling can prove itself incredibly useful. By talking to your inner-self, you can reach a whole new level of abstraction on your past, current and future work.

I’ve written quite a lot of computer code, whether on a university or personal exploration purpose. Facing a problem, whether it’s a bug or a lack of creativity, what was the most effective debugging tool I’ve found?

Talking. Finding someone to talk to and explaining to him the problem. What happens most of the time?

So you know for my calculator app code ... and after that I’m calling back the function to … HOLY CRAP I KNOW WHY IT DOESN’T WORK THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Your interlocutor doesn’t even have to say a word. You figured it out on your own.

And I’m pretty sure this has a much broader scope than just programming. By explaining, rephrasing, adapting, abstracting for a person to understand, the solution for your problem might show up, just like that.

And most of the time you just can’t have that person to talk to. However, a journal can be just the right candidate.

How?

By starting today! Whether it’s on actual paper, on a smartphone app or anything else.

I guess it would be even possible to do it orally and speaking out loud.

I’m using Google Calendar again for that. I’ve set up a Journal calendar for it, and every night I’m adding a full-day event, using a qualificative title like “Best day of the month!”, adding the content inside the Description field. Using an IFTTT applet, it gets automatically backed up as documents in a specific folder on my Google Drive.

#7 Reviewing The Next Day

Back when I started waking up early, I sometimes took a long time to have breakfast and shower. Mostly because at some point, I didn’t really know what to work on during my morning block.

The thing is, when you start having time that you didn’t have before, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by nothing and forget to actually do something.

This is precisely what made me understand the simple fact that today started yesterday.

How?

In order to get started promptly and avoid wasting the precious morning minutes that are said to be the most productive, it’s very important to know where to start.

It’s as simple as allowing 5 minutes at the end of the day to think about the day after.

What works for me is having a look at my calendar, and renaming the blocks with the project I’ll work on.

Additionally, I like to add a Plan B. As we previously discussed, there is nothing wrong with feeling more attracted by another project while working. But in order to avoid jumping to other pointless activity, we have to cover our backs. To do so, I put another thing to do in parenthesis, right in the title.

For instance, my morning Side projects block becomes Todoboard (Medium story).

#8 Allowing Thinking Time

Last but not least, as they say.

I’m pretty sure you exactly know what I mean and what to do about it. Ever got a genius insight while showering or walking?

Our minds are like children. When they get onto something they like, they can’t let go. The brain keeps that background thread running, and during a slow moment, it provides you with this answer you were looking for, hours, or even days before.

How?

Still, that Eureka-moment can’t happen if our main thread is constantly occupied.

It doesn’t have to be hours. Optimizing every minute of your life is awesome, I can relate. So much to learn, no time to lose.

But letting your mind wander during that 5-minute walk back home can achieve so much more than this podcast fragment you’d prefer hearing.

Whenever possible, getting to bed 10 minutes earlier than usual can get similar results.

And that’s precisely how this story idea came to my mind.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 293,189+ people.

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8 Killer Habits That Made Last Month So Productive was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the most part of my life, I have been racing in mountain bike competitions.

Since I’m old enough to take part in the Elites races of my country, I’ve had to endure countless hours of training. During the season, it can easily reach 15 hours a week.

And fun isn’t the word I’d use to describe this spare-time activity. During the almost-daily interval training, you have to continue till you can’t hold the targeted power. Till you can’t take it anymore.

How do I know if I went far enough? Was it my mind that forced me to stop? Or was it my body? It’s really hard to know.

That’s why you have to push as far you can, in order to minimize the potential regrets that come later.

Many times you just can’t help but think that this has to stop. But you don’t. You keep on working out. Every single day.

Because you know this is what can get you to the Top-25, the Top-10, the Podium, or whatever goal you’ve set.

This is what it takes.

That’s part of the reason most athletes have trainers. To help us both working in the right direction AND avoid quitting.

Mine is more a mentor than a trainer.

There are countless lessons that I can draw from my experience in moutain bike racing.

But the one I’m not ready to forget started from something my trainer told the whole team after a race:

Remember, you are where you are now, you made it to the podium, or you simply finished your first Elites race because of your training and your dedication. Not because of luck. Luck doesn’t exist in cycling.

After a small break he continued:

The only thing that can prevent you from reaching your goal is bad luck. Shit happens. But it can’t happen all the time. One day you’ll reach your goal, and it won’t have anything to do with luck.

It’s Easy to Think “I was lucky”

Being an athlete is far from easy. Just like being anyone with great responsibilities, or working on something that requires creativity.

And in these three situations that came to my mind, self-confidence is probably the hardest skill to master.

For instance, after every achievement comes a time for doubts. This specific time where you can’t help but wonder if it was even a product of your work.

But instead a great alignment of stars.

Or even the side-effect of something totally unrelated such as wearing your fetish socks or whatever thing you did that coincidentally matched with your achievement. Trust me, I’ve been there.

Yet, the training is obviously the cause of the achievement.

This is the kind of thing that we have to remember and remind ourselves.

Luck Is Nothing but a Jealous Misconception

I’m pretty sure that everyone has fallen for jealousy, at least once (c’mon, maybe for a very very short moment?).

I mean, it’s so easy to think that Benjamin P. Hardy was lucky to reach the #1 writer status on Medium. Or that J.K. Rowling was lucky to have this idea of a world of sorcerers. Or that Jeff Bezos was lucky to create one of the first online retailers.

But it certainly doesn’t account for all the work they’ve been doing, whether it was publishing thousands of articles, (re)writing thousands of chapters, or defeating thousands of opponents with innovations.

For the countless hours they’ve had to spend perfecting their skills.
For the countless obstacles they’ve had to overcome.

That’s why their success has absolutely nothing to do with luck.

My trainer wasn’t actually right about something: luck is not only absent from cycling, but from every field. Whether it’s business, technology, publishing, science or politics.

We can wait for the starts to align. Maybe they will.
Or we can Act. Learn. Improve. Grow. Build. Lead. Compete.

Luck is a notion some people invented to justify their lack of success regarding others.

Back to the cover picture. Yes, this one was actually meaningful.

Should we pick the books on the left or the Maneki-neko, “fortune cat”, on the right?

I’d obviously go for the former.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 277,994+ people.

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Luck Isn’t a Thing was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the holy place for lessons about self-improvement and success that is Medium, one can read everywhere that watching TV is one of the worst habits that someone can have, and that we should all drop it.

Most Top Writers praise reading books instead. Books indeed enable continuous learning, reflexion and don’t prevent us from falling asleep.

The idea of dropping TV is backed by the fact that many people are just laying on the couch during their spare time. Doing nothing but consuming entertainment like reality shows or pointless mainstream news reports. They are wasting their time taking the easy path and learning nothing.

Still, if it wasn’t for TV I wouldn’t be able to write these words.

Foreign TV is one of the best ways to learn a language

Obviously, there was a catch with my headline.

Watching TV isn’t that bad, if, and only if, it does provide enough value for the time spent.

In my case, watching English-speaking TV shows for years have helped me a lot getting rid of my native French accent (is that even possible?), as well as diving into foreign cultures.

Books are very great as well, in order to learn a language. I’m a serious reader too. Yet, pronunciation is left to the reader guess, which is often very wrong.

And if you happen to reach the end of the day, having worked so hard during both your work time and spare time on your side project, and you just feel like doing nothing, then watching a TV show in a foreign language might be the best compromise between learning and resting.

The only way to progress in learning a language’s pronunciation is to listen. And this can either be achieved by genuinely consuming media contents, or living in the country. Usually, the second option isn’t possible right away, so embracing the first on a daily basis is the only solution left.

Guidelines are great. They allow for solid starting points. Yet, it is up to us to customize them to match our goals. Any habit can be considered bad or good depending on the person. Some people may find value and things to learn in certain activities, while others may not.

What matters isn’t following the golden success habit that a famous person enlightened.
What matters is trying to find value in it, and embracing it only if it contributes to the progress toward our own goals.

Watching TV Isn’t That Bad was originally published in The Post-Grad Survival Guide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the incredible and barely followable pace that’s been going on in our society during the last decade, it is becoming clearer and clearer that most jobs are going to disappear. And the time schedule isn’t centuries, but rather a couple of decades, or even years.

Following the path of great leaders we all heard of, more and more people are quitting their regular employee job to get the status of Founder or CEO. They may feel this tendency of jobs shifting and want to act before it’s too late, or they’re just better off working on their own.

Either way, most of them consider themselves as entrepreneurs. Some have finally found something to get committed to, others are driven by the money.

If you ask someone in the street to tell you the definition of an entrepreneur, the answer you’ll get is certainly going to be “the founder of a company”.

I’m pretty sure that I would have said something like that before the travel experience I’ve had a couple months ago.

A Trip on an Island With an Incredible Host

Back in the middle of September, I was traveling with some friends in North-East Malaysia. We booked a tent in a rainforest camp, on a paradisiacal island. The owner of this modest camp was a Malay named Amir.

The weekend was absolutely perfect, how not could it be on an island like this. But the experience we had was made even better thanks to Amir. He made himself really helpful all the time, proposing to cook breakfast for us, putting our shoes under the tent roof when it started raining or offering us taxi boat services. He even sent us a message before our trip for some recommendations on what to bring in terms of clothing or which phone carrier was recommended to get the best possible service. I’m not even talking about the fact that it was the cheapest accommodation on both islands.

Meet Amir, The Only Real Entrepreneur I Know

We had long chats with Amir throughout the weekend, but the last one is still resonating inside my head.

Having A Mission That’s Not Being Your Own Boss

Amir said he started the camp because he felt like he had a mission. Beforehand, he always knew that pleasing and helping people was the only thing that made him happy.

So when he finally finished school, he decided it was time to work toward this mission of him. He got the idea of an island camp because he knew that lots of people like to disconnect and go back to nature when they’re on vacations.

When we thanked him for all the services he provided us during the weekend, he told us that it was perfectly normal. That every other accommodations owner should do the same. He loved to take care of people so he was dedicating all his energy to this matter.

Money Ain’t A Thing

Back on our first night when we arrived, Amir screamed at us something that sounded like a joke:

You can leave all your money in the tent, nobody will take it. But take good care of your lighters if you have some, these things don’t last long out here!

We laughed, obviously. This really was a joke for us. But it definitely wasn’t.

During our final chat, the conversation went indeed on to money. And Amir told us that he didn’t know how much he had. He said “Money is in the bank. All of it. I don’t care, I don’t know how much I have. I don’t need it here.”

Money clearly wasn’t what he was attracted to. He told us that the only thing that money could do to him was perverting his mind, and thus making him drift away from his mission. He said even if he were broke, he’d find a way to keep the camp opened and pursuing his passion for making the people there happy.

This is surely nothing new, but the way he said it, smiling, made us understand that he was really happy about his life. He wasn’t preaching this to be heard.

An Entrepreneur Employee Isn’t An Oxymoron

This was the last part of our chat, and that’s the one I’m far from forgetting.

Amir explained to us that being the owner had nothing to do with his mission. He started the camp because there was nothing like it in his area. But if he had had a chance of working for a camp like his own in the first place, he would have.

The reason he gave for this statement was the fact that being the owner made him handle many things that weren’t related to his mission. Things that only existed because he was the boss. He said he wished that he could be an employee with the sole purpose of pursuing his mission of helping people. That the choice he made of starting the camp was his only option, but he’d prefer working for someone else and thus dedicating even more of his energy toward pleasing his guests.

Being a founder is just one way of pursuing our own mission, among plenty of others.

This is what most people miss about the very concept of entrepreneurship. A lot of CEOs and Founders end up doing work that they didn’t want to do in the first place. The contrary is actually so rare that people, including myself, are astonished when they hear things like Elon Musk spending about 80% of his time solving real engineering problems. Meaning working on what he actually aspired for before launching his companies. Still, 20% remains quite a lot of time.

If one’s so in love with his field, starting a company may not be the best way to both be delighted at work and fulfill his mission.

The New Definition The World Needs

The fact that entrepreneurship better attests a specific mindset than a Founder position in a company was related by Tim Denning in a story a couple weeks ago about lessons learned from the greatest Uber driver, Vincent.

To me, it looks like my Amir is no different than his Vincent, and the best adjective to qualify both of them could be something like entrepreunable.

Sadly it doesn’t exist, so let’s invent it.

entrepreunable (adj.): (of a person) of rock-solid mindset, willing to do everything necessary to pursue her mission.

An entrepreunable driver, an entrepreunable camp owner, an entrepreunable nurse, an entrepreunable baker, an entrepreunable teacher.

The definition of the overhyped entrepreneur status has to change. Will the current one even make sense in the future we’re jumping into? Will it matter to be a Founder in ten or fifty years?

I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Yet, such entrepreunable person concept goes far beyond our current technology-driven world. This very notion has crossed centuries and isn’t likely to stop in a near future. Because it is deeply rooted in our human DNA.

Undertake, entreprendre, unternehmen, emprender, …

It’s always about what you do and who you are inside.
Not where, when or under which status.

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Focus.

I really have to stay focused on this. Alright, let’s do this.

Snap, I forgot to find a Christmas present for my sister.

** CTRL+T | amazon.com **

Exactly one hour later:
 — 911, what’s your emergency?
 — I lost my focus, once again, can you help me?

This happened to me a week ago.

Not the 911 part, but still. I had planned to get some work done on my programming side project. I didn’t. Luckily enough, I did find a present. But it wasn’t the right time to handle this matter.

I had lost the focus game. Once again.

The Situation

Nowadays, the Internet is at the root of almost every kind of distractions. More and more tools are web-based. And even if we still do some work on dedicated native apps, the web browser is always opened aside, waiting for the right moment to get our full attention.

They are basically three things we can do to prevent this evil from hurting our focus:

• Work with a tool that doesn’t have a web browser
• Have an incredible focus and commitment
• Hurt our self so badly when we open the dangerous new tab that we get back to work immediately

The first one is a no-brainer since there will always be a case where you’ll need the browser to get some help with your work.

The incredible focus and commitment, well. It can definitely have an impact at your workplace. But for stuff like side-projects, it may not.

Which leaves us with the last option. Finding a compromise between keeping the web browser opened and being freaked out by something. Something that could make you feel so guilty that there is no way around not getting your focus back.

Since computers can’t read our minds (yet), it has to be something that can work in every situation.

What are we the most afraid of losing? Our money, our job, our skills?

Our Time. And not our day time, or our week time. The finite and irretrievable “Time” that is being given to us when we were born.

The Trick

I was browsing Medium when I came across the incredible app that is Gyroscope. An operating system for the human body, as they advertise. Gyroscope is merging data coming from the wide possibilities of services you can link. This app is the most beautifully designed and polished I’ve seen to date. Yet I don’t find it to be useful enough for me to trade in and centralize all my personal data.

Back to our topic, I do use one unique free feature: the web browser new tab replacement.

There are many themes available, but the one we’re looking for here is called Motivation, for obscure reasons.

The only thing it displays is my age. But definitely not in a common way.

The 9th digit is changing so fast that you can’t follow it.
In fact, the last three digits are increasing at a very noticeable speed.

Scary, isn’t it?

Can you picture your precious Time fleeing away so fast that it frightens the hell out of you?

Well, try to set this up as a new browser tab.

Next time you’ll hit CTRL+T, I guarantee you that you will stare at your screen, eyes wide opened.

So badly hurt that you’ll hear yourself saying “Screw this”, and get back to work as soon as possible.

Plus I’m only twenty 😟.

Only a Chrome extension is available for now, I don’t know if they’ll extend it to more platforms in the future. I could have coded one for the story, but I thought giving credits to Gyroscope for this idea was better. Let me know in the comments if you would be interested in a cross-browser user-account-free implementation of this idea.

The Takeaway

No matter how hard or committed we are or try to be, there will always be a part of humanity in us, which differentiates our self from machines. The same humanity will force us to take the slippery 5' break to go shopping or reading. Or handling whatever pseudo-urgent matter that isn’t tightly related to our work.

Pretending that something is urgent is the greatest time-eater possible.

A way to kick our self where it hurts and bring us back to earth has to be found. This trick worked for me this entire week. Maybe I’ll get used to seeing my Time melting away and it will eventually stop working. But I don’t think so. And I’m confident about the fact that I’m not the only one.

This was my new tab screen when I finished writing this story. It took me about 0.0004 years. Reasoning in hours, days or weeks doesn’t really grab our attention. But it does for years, especially when we see them pilling up in real time, right at the decisive moment.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 273,103+ people.

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The Ultimate Trick to Stay Focused 24/7 was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.