About

Have you ever wanted to keep a closer check on your switching habits, or are you interested in seeing who was busy at what time of the day?

Meet SwitchCounter, a website where you can log your switches and do just that!

See how you have been switching over the course of days, weeks or months with customizable graphics.
You can log your system’s switches easily on the website or through an API, e.g. for logging right from your Android home screen.
Additionally, you can opt-in for anonymous data collection to support switching-related research in the process!

The current features include:

• Mobile-friendly web app
• View your past switches and edit them (if you ever forget to add one!)
• Configurable and informative graphs
• Downloadable logs of your switches
• An API for your own projects to log switches or see who’s currently in control
• Opt-in: Allow other logged-in users to see the members of your system and who is switched in.
• Opt-in: Allow your anonymous data to be collected and used for future research into switching habits.

Screenshots:

We primarily wrote SwitchCounter for ourselves. Switching has been a big part of our shared life for more than four years, but it always had an ephemeral character. We do have our share of memories of exceptional moments and who of us was in at the time. But the vast majority is just us going about our day, switching around a few times as we feel like. What we find is, that we quickly forget who did what. This big part of our shared life just happens internally and unobservable even by our future eyes.

We never were able to take a step back and see the big picture. How did we distribute our time really? Were we fair or did someone get much less than everyone else?

A friend of ours started building their own switch logging system and we used it for a few months in 2016. It had a MQTT interface and they hosted it on a Raspberry Pi at their home and use it mostly for their smart home system - which is a project awesome in its own right. Check it out here

We logged our switches with an MQTT app on our phone, and the server returned the percentage how much each of us was switched in over the course of the last few days. We got really into logging our switches. Finally they had some sort of weight outside of our head and a record of them persisted.

Soon we came up with a whole number of new ideas that went way beyond what was easily adaptable to the system of our friend.
So eventually we started down along the road to build an app of our own with lots of helps and insights of dear friends.

After working on it for several months and getting a few friends to beta-test it for some more while we kept adding additional features here and there, we are now happy to share our app with the community in the hope that some of you will find it useful!

SwitchCounter is by no means completed! We have a long list of things we want to add, from more informative graph, over options to edit and customize members, to lots of little improvement.

You can contact us at crntech@switchcounter.science. We are looking forward to any and all feedback and ideas.

Please feel welcome to link to this message and spread it to anyone who might be interested in our site.

Cyan, Rainbow & Munin