wasteyourtime.online

Micro:bit
GIF
Throbber

Inspiration

We wanted to build something unuseful with an artistic scope.

What it does

wasteyourtime.online does absolutely nothing. It displays a throbber (loading thingy) and after a while asks you to reload the page by clicking on a button. The bonus project with a Micro:bit also doesn't do anything. It just flashes the leds so it looks like it's displaying a throbber.

How we built it

We built the webapp using Flask. We made the template with HTML, and the alert function with an embedded Javascript script. The throbber thingy was designed in Photoshop and animated usign After Effects. We deployed the app on Heroku. We also have a Domain.com pointingto the Heroku app. The micro:bit program was made in Javascipt as well.

Challenges we ran into

Making the GIF for the loading animation was quite dfificult. Our plans at first were to make a very long, elabroate and frustrating GIF, but we encountered many problems while exporting such a big file so we decided to keep it simple. We aslo had some trouble with deploying the app to Heroku. Finally we were afraid that our Domain.com domain wouldn't work because it showed an error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having deployed an app from start to end, including making it available on a domain. This is something neither of us had done before.We are also proud of our little throbber Throbby, it is like our son. We are also happy to have made hardware a part of our project.

What we learned

We learned about animating and GIF-making, like a ton, you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to render it succesfully. We also learned how to deploy a project into production, which was a first time for both of us.

We also learned it's called T-H-R-O-B-B-E-R (throbber!) don't forget it!