Pokemon Watch

Memory Palaces are a great way to remember a list of things. Take the rooms in your house, associate each one with an item, and then “walk through” your house to remember all the items. But I only have ~5 rooms, and that’s being generous – what if I want to remember, say, 60 things? It’d be great to have a go-to list of 60 things that I could just pull up whenever and use them as loci for whatever list.

Enter Pokemon. These little critters (there are over 750 now) are unique, distinctive, named, and numbered. Learning the first 60 would give me a pretty universal memory-palace list. Furthermore, they’re chunked into groups of 2-3 (Bulbasaur evolves into Ivysaur evolves into Venusaur), and I still remember some characteristics of them from the Pokemon video game when I was a kid, making for even easier learning. And they’re cute.

I forgot to sketch anything, unfortunately. The design is simple, just a pokemon image for the current minute (0-59) plus the pokemon’s name. No hour hand, because people generally know what hour it is and space is limited. The technology took a little fussing though, because I wanted relatively high-res images (144×144) but space is limited (96kb). More info on my pebble image hacks here.

Screenshots:

 2:17pm, or 2:Pidgeotto, if you will.

 2:19 is now 2:Rattata.

Did I do what I wanted? Pretty much, yeah. Technically, the watch is exactly what I was hoping for. I didn’t quite learn all the Pokemon yet, but I’m getting there. Plus, I got some good experience hacking around with new hardware, poorly documented bugs, C memory issues, and screwing around with B/W images.

Code’s here. Images are from http://www.marriland.com, for example http://www.marriland.com/forums/updates-and-announcements/featured-weekly-poll/444268-poll-6-which-is-your-favorite-kanto-starter. Code includes uPNG port from Matthew Hungerford: https://github.com/mhungerford/png_demo, which is itself derived from LodePNG version 20100808, by Lode Vandevenne and Sean Middleditch.