Carl

Carl

It had one dial between Low/Medium/High
And one free-spinning dial for time with somewhat logrithmically-spaced timed and a ring of leds to show the current time.
It sounds overly complex but is very obvious and intuitive, and I think actually an improvement over the linear mechanical dial for multiple reasons without adding any UI complexity:
- the dial just felt great (smooth turning with a subtle minima at each tick)
- much simpler mechanics (just a free-spinning dial and probably an optical shaft-encoder), so much less to break
- leds visible from across the room (thermometer style readout, in a circle around the dial, so no need to squint and read numbers).
- tick up or down at any time by turning the dial a little. (Mechanical timers allow this too but it feels icky and often hysteresis is large which makes it hard to adjust properly.)
- logarithmic spacing means you can hit any time you're likely to care about in a single small twist of the wrist: 30s/1m/1:30/2m/3m/5m/10m/20m — something like that, probably slightly finer grain on the low end.

This is in addition to all of the advantages of the much-neglected two-dial setup in the first place.

No start button. And just generally it was a clean, elegant little unit, no extra fluff. Can't find it for the life of me, but if I have to ship one from NZ and buy a 120->240 power converter I will.