Don’t be boring.

Moodbot Case Study

How to come up and talk about your hardware ideas.

I experiment on myself a lot. The crazy diets, insane exercise regimens, mental strength practice, daily breathing — you name it. Many of these activities correlate directly with my mood.

What is mood?

It’s an impossible to precisely measure state of my mind on a given day. By impossible to measure I mean it’s only based on how I feel about that state. It’s never a definite 5/10 or 9/10 — ever.

So why would you want to measure something so imprecise?

Trends

That’s because, same as with sleep tracking, the individual values don’t matter, but assuming I roughly pick the right value each day, the trends and correlations is where it gets interesting.

One of my very last cups of specialty coffee. Oslo, Norway, July 2023.

Coffee?

A recent example is me quitting coffee (and all forms of caffeine) after being seriously reliant on it.

I felt terrible. Splitting headaches, feeling on the edge every day, irritable, annoying.

Now, I’ve done this a couple times before, but I never tracked my mood until this last time. So I had no idea how long — for me — the withdrawal symptoms from caffeine lasted.

Now I know. Exactly 6 excrutiating days.

Individual values don’t matter. The trends and correlations is where it gets interesting.

I used a pen and paper method of tracking my mood, by simply assinging a number to each day. But then, hiking a northern Norway mountain I had an idea and decided to quickly sketch it out.

Sometimes good ideas come at high altitudes.

Current solutions

Pen and paper

Writing out a number manually is the cheapest and easiest solution. But it’s also pretty…