- The ‘Thought Catcher’ is a DIY Raspberry Pi-powered device for capturing late night thoughts
- It has no screen and converts your speech into text, then uploads the transcription to Notion
- With this tool you might no longer need to reach for your phone when in bed
If you’re anything like me then you’re probably familiar with lying awake in bed, mind buzzing, and thoughts coming to you when you’d rather be sleeping. That’s annoying enough in itself, but it’s even worse when you feel compelled to use your phone to record those thoughts – further staving off sleep by looking at its lit up screen. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
As spotted by XDA Developers, Ansh Trivedi has used a Raspberry Pi to create what they call a ‘Thought Catcher’, also known as the TC-01. It’s a device that you place by your bed, and if a thought comes to you, then you can press a button on it and speak to record the thought.
Press the button again when you’re done speaking, and whatever you said will be transcribed by the AI-powered Whisper.cpp service, and sent to Notion, with a beep letting you know that’s been achieved.
Get some screen-free sleep
So there’s no need to reach for your phone, and therefore one less reason to even keep your phone by your bed, which is ideal if you tend to reach for it at night – be that to record a thought or browse social media – when you’d rather not.
When you wake up in the morning, you’ll then find those thoughts in a Notion database, categorized as an ‘idea’, ‘task’, or ‘note’, complete with a summary-style title, relevant keywords, a timestamp for when the note was captured, and – if it’s a task – an urgency level assigned to it, as you can see in the image below.
Of course, this being Raspberry Pi-based, you’d have to make it yourself, much like Trivedi has done. And as well as the Raspberry Pi itself, it also requires a physical button, a microphone, and a buzzer – plus Python code to configure it.
It’s also something that Trivedi is still working on, so future versions may be improved. The full details of how to make this haven’t been released either, but Trivedi says they’ll share that if there’s interest.
It certainly sounds like an appealing device though – especially if a smaller version of it can be produced. Then after that I’ll just need a waterproof one I can use in the shower, as that’s the other time when thoughts tend to come to me.
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