Making someone a birthday cake is very thoughtful, but not if they are watching their weight. [MrFox] found a way around that: an Arduino-powered birthday cake. Even if you don’t mind the calories, an Arduino cake is a novelty and sure to be a hit with a hacker who’s another year older.
The cake uses a UTFT LCD shield which eats up a lot of pins and memory, so the project uses an Arduino Mega. A speaker plays the happy birthday song (which may even be legal now) while a microphone detects the birthday boy or girl blowing out the virtual candles.
We’ve seen similar cakes with a fixed number of LED “candles” before, but the LCD screen makes this a cake of a different color. If you want, you could look into something that is actually edible. On the other hand, we’re kind of partial to the Jolly Wrencher with red eyes and fireworks, ourselves.
The video shows the birthday cake in action. Given the screen, we were surprised that nothing popped out. Not a life-changing project, but still fun for your next hacker party, even if you have a real cake as a backup.
cool…should we take one to school?
Only if you want it mistaken for a bomb…
lol…yep…what an exciting day…birthdays are so much fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHk_6Vh4Qeo
Not in the USA Because your Teacher will think it’s a Bomb. At least if you look a little bit like a terrorist.
lol…that was my point exactly…
Easy…. send an email to your head teacher before you go to school saying “Dear Tomorrow I am bringing in to school a great surprise for someone. By the way it is not a bomb” Q.E.D.
woosh….
Come on HAD. A birthday cake picture on an arduino tft screen? That gets a write up? I have seen some rather abysmal articles but this take the…well, you know.
It’s slightly more than that (it plays a tune and senses when you blow to remove the candle flames), but yes, I agree with you, it’s not high on the list of best HaD articles.
At least it’s not “Hello World”
‘big’ TFT plus AVR is a good lesson in why you need much more RAM, DMA, and maybe a second SPI bus once you decide you want to do more complicated things. ARM Cortex M0 or M3 is a much better choice.
No matter how tweaked, 8 MHz SPI is going to limit how much 16 or 18-bit data you can push to the screen. No DMA makes it even harder to keep data flowing to the screen if you also have to process other data.
Reminds me of the time I was rewriting the Timeclock software at work. I happened to notice that the employee table included birthday. On a whim, I stuck a ‘Happy Birthday’ message on the ‘Punched In’ screen. I had several people who were very excited that the timeclock remembered.