Toothbrush Timer Using PICAXE

The project aims to build a flashing toothbrush timer that will beep every 30 seconds for 2 minutes to inform the different parts of the mouth to be brushed which is very beneficial for kids or anyone for oral care.

The device consists of PICAXE 08M microcontroller along with Piezo speaker, microswitch with mounting nut, vero strip board or project board, misc resistors, diffused red LED, 2XAA batteries, and stainless steel case. To indicate that the batteries are good, the heartbeat occurs every 15 seconds and the battery has long life that is almost its shelf life. The device is started by a pushbutton and automatically shuts down at the end of timing cycle. The 4 part timer has 30 seconds intervals and end-of-timing indicator.

The prototype board form Peter Anderson was used instead of the normal construction route of soldering individual components from scratch on a piece of perfboard. The piezo speaker is simply added along with pushbutton and an LED with dropping resistor. The power-ON indicator LED is not soldered because a long-life battery is desired since the LED draws about 20mA by just indicating that the board is ON during operation.

Rest of the project