Flexible circuit valentine

posted Feb 14th 2009 4:46pm by Eliot
filed under: led hacks, misc hacks

valentine

[xander] built this LED valentine for his loved one. It’s interesting because he used Pyralux, a flexible circuit board material from DuPont. He describes the consistency as “tough plastic tissue-paper”, but had no trouble using standard toner transfer etching. It has an ATtiny45 microcontroller that pulses the 16 LEDs at an approximation of his heart beat. To avoid soldering a bunch of surface mount resistors, he used two constant current shift registers.

Comments [10]

tagged: Atmel, attiny, attiny45, AVR, circuitboard, dupont, etching, led, pyralux, shiftregister, valentine, xander

10 Responses to Flexible circuit valentine

jme says:

February 14, 2009 at 7:27 pm

[ j m e ]

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HaDAk says:

February 14, 2009 at 7:38 pm

I wish I could do neat things like this. Suggestions on books to learn how?

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Sammy says:

February 14, 2009 at 8:59 pm

@ Hadak. so do I, so do I…

Very neat though !

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Lambda_drive says:

February 14, 2009 at 9:17 pm

Where does he put the batteries?

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xander says:

February 14, 2009 at 9:33 pm

The batteries are two AAA’s, the holder for which is hot-glued onto the back of the card. Consequently the card doesn’t actually close (I could have made that work with a thin-cell lithium) but rather stands on its own as pictured.

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hazed says:

February 15, 2009 at 1:39 am

Nice. I wish I would have heard about this before Valentines Day. Probably would have been a good idea to post it a week in advance.

Anyway, nice Idea. I’ll keep this one in mind next year. Very, very cool idea.

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Roboguy says:

February 15, 2009 at 6:58 am

Next step: add a piezo speaker for the heart beat hospital-machine type noises, and set up some way of having it “flat-line” when the batteries are nearing non-operational levels.

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fartface says:

February 16, 2009 at 5:56 am

Want to learn how to do this?

http://www.google.com How to learn electronics, how to etch circuit boards, how to design a circuit board, PIC programming, and finally digital electronics theory.

dont buy books. you have more info on the net than any book you can buy. I would also suggest taking electronics 101 at your local community college.

I want to know one thing. a source for the flexible board material. NONE of the suppliers out there I know of have it or can get it.

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the game says:

February 16, 2009 at 9:30 am

add wireless + feed from actual person to show actual heartbeat when you are away would be major win.