Hacking Life into My Little Counter
I always have fun bringing the digital into the physical world. Things that you can touch and hear give tactile joy - bonus points if there’s no/low-power display. So someone at work posted that the Shopify Counter was available for something like 10% of the manufacturer’s list price, I jumped at the chance to pick one up and hack something together. By default, the counter guides you to configure sales/orders to display, but we can have more fun than that.
The API is beautifully simple: you just need to provide an HTTP endpoint that will return a number. The counter is connected to Wifi and pings the Smiirl servers every few seconds, which will just proxy the request to your own server. I’m using val.town to run mine (increasingly finding that service invaluable) - took me all of one minute to build it.
I wanted this to be something that others could enjoy. I wanted this to update often (a counter that never changes is no fun). And I wanted it to be artistically engaging as well. So, here’s what I built : we choose whether this counter grows or dies.
