[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.
[ j m e ]
I wish I could do neat things like this. Suggestions on books to learn how?
@ Hadak. so do I, so do I…
Very neat though !
Where does he put the batteries?
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.
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.
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.
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.
add wireless + feed from actual person to show actual heartbeat when you are away would be major win.
Well its very unique, I’ll give you that.
Hi!
Can you actually use ferric chloride to etch these pyralux flex pcbs?
I’m trying to find this info because I think this would be a great solution to a proj I’m working on, but couldn’t find anything so far that bounds both ferric chloride and flex PCBs. Thanks!