- The ‘Thought Catcher’ is a Raspberry Pi-powered DIY device for capturing nighttime thoughts
- It’s screenless and converts your speech to text, then uploads the transcript to Notion
- With this tool you may no longer need to pick up your phone when you are in bed
If you’re like me, then you’re probably familiar with lying awake in bed, your mind whirring, 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 preventing sleep by staring at its illuminated screen. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
As discovered by XDA Developers, Ansh Trivedi has used a Raspberry Pi to create what they call a ‘Thought Catcher’, also known as TC-01. It’s a device you put next to your bed and if a thought comes to you, you can press a button and speak to record the thought.
Press the button again when you’re done speaking, and everything you’ve said will be transcribed by the AI-powered Whisper.cpp service and sent to Notion, with a beep letting you know it’s done.
Get some sleep without screens
So there’s no need to reach for your phone and therefore one less reason to even leave it next to your bed, which is ideal if you tend to reach for it at night, whether to record a thought or browse social media, when you’d rather not.
When you wake up in the morning, you’ll find those thoughts in a Notion database, categorized as ‘idea’, ‘task’ or ‘note’, complete with a summary-style title, relevant keywords, a timestamp of when the note was captured, and, if it’s a task, an assigned urgency level, as you can see in the image below.
Of course, being based on Raspberry Pi, you would have to do it yourself, as Trivedi has done. And in addition to the Raspberry Pi itself, it also requires a physical button, microphone, and buzzer, plus Python code to set it up.
It’s also something Trivedi is still working on, so future versions may be improved. The full details of how to do this have also not been published, but Trivedi says they will share them if there is interest.
However, it certainly sounds like an attractive device, especially if a smaller version can be produced. Then after that I’ll just need a waterproof one that I can wear in the shower since that’s the other time thoughts tend to come to me.
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