Wooing A Lady Into Persisting With Persistence… Of Vision

As the story goes, years ago [Matt Evans] was wooing the beautiful and talented [Jen]. There were many suitors vying for her hand; he would have to set himself apart. The trouble was, how to convince her that persisting in the relationship was the best and only course? What did he have to offer? Of course many of us know the answer; having wooed our own significant others with the same thing. Incredible and unrepentant nerdiness.

So! He toiled late into the night, his eyes burning with love and from the fumes of solder smoke. For her he would put his wizardry to work. At the wave of a hand would write songs of adoration in the air with nothing but light. The runes of power, all typed out in the proper order, would be held by a ATiny. A CR2032 coin cell provided the magic pixies which would march to its commands, delivering their spark to the LEDs in the right order.

He etched the board, wrote the code, and soldered the components. He encased it in his finest box of crystal clear plastic and black static foam, a gift of the samples department of the Maxim corporation.

Presumably the full moon was high in the air when he presented the box. He took it out and waved it with a flair. Poetry floated there in front of her eyes. It read, “Jen is cool!”. A few years later, they were married.

19 thoughts on “Wooing A Lady Into Persisting With Persistence… Of Vision

  1. Very nice build. The star on the front and flower on the back are excellent examples of microwave components implemented as shapes in copper. Didn’t know ATtinys ran fast enough for that to be important, but I assume it is, since the circuit clearly works.

    One minor thing, though: much of the black antistatic foam I’ve seen is VERY conductive, like only a few kohms between two points near each other, so you might want to put a piece of paper between the battery and the foam to take advantage of the ultra-low-power modes of the microcontroller.

    1. Regarding the first part, what you mean are distributed element filters. They have nothing to do with this design, that star is just sitting in the ground plane for decoration purposes.

      1. I see you still misunderstand.
        1) Kitsch: art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.
        “the lava lamp is an example of sixties kitsch”
        2) “Kitschy” is a plausible mispronunciation/misspelling of “Coetzee”.

        Although the definition doesn’t really indicate it, kitschy is sometimes considered cute. It’s just not terribly stylish.

        I thought it was pretty clever.

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