Reverse Swear Box Curses (For) You

If you are running out of swear words to comment the magic smoke coming from your electronics, [Howard] has just the right weekend project for you: The reverse swear box. Most swear boxes would have you drop in a coin as penance for uttering your choice phrases. Instead, at the touch of a button, this obscure but classy device randomly suggests a four letter swear word and displays it on a 14-segment LED display for immediate or later use.

It’s built upon an ATmega168 and only requires a minimum of external components. The schematics and firmware for this project are freely available on the project page. There’s also an extremely profane header file, packed with 37 case-insensitive four-letter words you may not actually want to include in your toolkit. On the other hand, many of these words score intimidatingly well at Scrabble.

19 thoughts on “Reverse Swear Box Curses (For) You

  1. False advertising. Reverse swear box should be an ATM I curse at. Cursing passwords? Will not withdraw money if you are not genuinely emoting. Shows you a picture of some neighbor or celebrity you hate and g d m and f and then boom, 100 in cash flops out.

      1. Still, is that really a swear word? There’s got to be some better stuff in there. But I would have expanded the display so I could use things like “rat farts” – still my favorite from Caddyshack

    1. How does 5MB even enter your head……. unless you upgraded an 8 slot 30 pin SIMM 486 motherboard from 4×256 to 4×256 and 4×1024… (w00t will slackware boot off floppy now? Kept whining about not enough low memory….)

    2. For those who don’t get it, check out Red Dwarf. See previous obligatory quote. As an aside, a long time ago in a far far away land a friend build a “Turing Test” system for a science museum that responded to keyed input. It had a blacklist of swear words not to be used. Unfortunately, it also had a keyboard command that dumped the entire blacklist. Kids like to play with keyboards………

  2. Just thinking it would probably be more fun to have a big labelled “Swear Jar” that has a proximity switch and blasts out storms of invective any time anyone goes near it.

  3. I like how he used the ‘BRAIN’ routing algorithm to get a single sided board with just a couple of straight links on the other side.

    The board looks really good for a DIY!

    I probably would have put a programming port on there to but I understand why he didn’t – they take up so much room for routing on a small single sided board.

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