What’s a hacker to do to profess his love for his dearest beloved? [Nitesh Kadyan] built his lady-love this awesome LED pendant – the LED BLE Hearty Necklace Badge.
The hardware is pretty vanilla by today’s hacker standards. An ATMega328p does most of the heavy lifting. An HM-11 BLE module provides connection to an Android mobile app. Two 74HC595 shift registers drive 16 columns of red LEDs and a ULN2803 sinks current from the 8 rows. The power section consists of a charger for the 320mAh LiPo and an LDO for the BLE module. All the parts are SMD with the passives mostly being 0603, including the 128 LEDs.
[Nitesh] didn’t get a stencil made for his first batch of boards, so all the parts were painstakingly soldered manually and not in a reflow oven. And on his first board, he ended up soldering all of the LED’s the wrong way around. Kudos to him for his doggedness and patience.
The Arduino code on the ATmega is also quite straightforward. All characters are stored as eight bytes each in program memory and occupy 8×8 pixels on the matrix. The bytes to be displayed are stored in a buffer and the columns are left shifted fast enough for the marquee text effect. The Android app is built by modifying a demo BLE app provided by Google. The firmware, Android app, and the KiCAD design files are all hosted on his Github repository.
[Nitesh] is now building a larger batch of these badges to bring them to hillhacks – the annual hacker-con for making and hacking in the Himalayas. Scheduled for later this month, you’ll have to sign up on the mailing list for details and if you’d like to snag one of these badges. To make it more interesting, [Nitesh] has added two games to the code – Tetris and Snakes. Hopefully, this will spur others to create more games for the badge, such as Pong.
“[Nitesh] is now building a larger batch of these badges to bring them to hillhacks – the annual hacker-con for making and hacking in the Himalayas.”
Wow! They really do have those everywhere.
Reminds me (somewhat) of an LED o’scope I designed and built a few decades ago (but with through-hole parts). Mine only had 100 LEDs in a 10×10 matrix, and I managed to get the polarity right the first time. Haven’t done a lot of intense soldering lately, but a few projects are calling my name…
I’d suggest making it pulse when the two of you are within Bluetooth range of each other… or make two badges pulse in unison, like some fireflies.
Hi Queeg, Thanks for the suggestion. I will leave that to hackers at the conf who want to hack the badge.
Sure beats the blinky heart necklace in “The Wizard of Speed and Time”.