Valentine’s Gift Counts The Days Spent Together

[Vegard Paulsen] dug deep down to the romantic geek at his core and built this box that counts the days he’s spent together with his Valentine. As you can see, it uses a four-digit seven segment display installed in the lid of a wooden box. An Arduino mini is responsible for driving the display, but as you might already know, to keep accurate time you’re going to need a reliable clock source. Instead of using a temperature compensated crystal oscillator like the ChronoDot he decided to pull time data from the Internet via a pair of RF modules.

His closing comments mention that this display will only work for around 27 years but he figures he can always build a bigger display. We’d keep this around, physically unaltered for sentimental value, but switch to a hexadecimal readout to track just over 179 years. Maybe that’s a bit too geeky.

20 thoughts on “Valentine’s Gift Counts The Days Spent Together

  1. The RF module is what I’d use too – it’s foolproof one it picks up the Frankfurt long wave signal, no matter how many days the battery may have been out – and this is the kind of application where you do NOT want mistakes.

    But I would have made it a bit more private – display embedded INTO the box, so you see it when you lift the lid (sensed with a magnet embedded in the lid, hall sensor in the box itself). The battery would last way longer, and you could have that extra bit of “fridge magic” never quite knowing what the display does with the lid closed.

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