“I wanted to try to address a real problem faced in our household (and, I imagine, that of many other readers), which is how to allocate, motivate, and reward my children for helping out with household chores.
Up to now, we’ve kept a laminated sheet of A4 paper stuck to the side of the fridge. It has a grid of tasks printed on it, with associated amounts of pocket money that could be earned for completing that task. The idea is that each time one of our kids helps out with a chore, they get a tick in that box and, at the end of each week, we add up the money earned, wipe the board and start again. However, the list of tasks is out-of-date and hard to change, we sometimes don’t remember to wipe the board clean each week, and some tasks need to be performed with different frequencies - some would ideally be done daily, whereas others might only be once a month. So, I set about creating an Arduino-based device to address these issues - my intention was to create something that allowed for easy addition/removal/updating of tasks, a streamlined mechanism for recording when a task had been done and allocating credit to the appropriate person, and a way to keep track of different schedules and frequency with which different tasks need to be performed, and highlight overdue tasks. And this instructable will show how the resulting “Task Manager” device came out.”