For some ungodly reason, [Scott] has a friend that wanted a ‘sexting themed’ Halloween costume. We won’t try to make any presumptions of the creativity or mental stability of [Scott]’s friend, but the SMS scrolling LED belt buckle he came up with is pretty cool.
The belt is based around a $13 scrolling LED belt buckle [Scott] found online. There was a problem with the belt buckle, though. Thirteen dollars means [Scott] didn’t get a whole lot of features with his buckle, so there are only 3 buttons on the entire device: letter up, letter down, and enter. Instead of pressing a button 80 times to get a lowercase ‘z,’ an Arduino was thrown into the mix to take care of all the button pressing.
The Arduino sketch could now input any message into the belt buckle in a matter of seconds. All that was left to do is taking care of the SMS to text part of the build. For this, [Scott] used the Sparkfun USB Host Shield and a custom Android app. Whenever an SMS is received on the phone, the message is sent through the USB shield to the Arduino and output on the belt buckle.
We won’t make any assumptions about the content of the messages during the Halloween party, but at least the video demo of the build is family friendly. Check it out after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=2t_RFcOe61g&w=470]
Nice!
Probably a good Apple why as to have a microcontroller handy, and knowing how to use it. I guess I better obtain one, and start learning
Good grief, don’t have a clue as to how example ended up as Apple. Probably wasn’t paying attention to the spell checker selection. LOL
– Sent from an iNtangible
Wonder how many people sent him the message “Home of the Whopper!” or “Here’s the beef!”, only improvement would be to get rid of the programming phase and just directly display the message, if possbile.
I can think of a reason why someone would wear this costume. So that leads me to ask, did it work? Did Scott’s friend bring home a skank?
This is interesting, but I’m confused what it has to do with sextiong…
I thought sexting referred to the sending of pictures.
its like phone sex, via text
The costume at least involved the requisite pic with missing head. A blurred version is on the site once it recovers from the hackaday onslaught.
Looks like fun. Why not do it all on the phone though? There are plenty of LED scroller apps available!
Because then you’d have to have a phone strapped wherever, instead of safely in your pocket.
I plan on using this method to make a quick and dirty Thomas Daft Punk helmet for Halloween.