[Rickysisodia] had a few dead ATmega128 chips laying around that he didn’t want to just throw away, so he decided to turn them into his own light-up fidget toy. The toy is in the form of a six-sided die so small that you can hang it on a keychain. He soldered an ATmega128 on each side of the cube and added a few dot circles to give his toy the look of a functional dice. We were pretty amazed by his impressive level of dexterity. Soldering those 0.8 mm-pitch leads together seems pretty tedious if you ask us.
Then he wired a simple, battery-powered tilt switch LED circuit on perfboard that he was able to sneakily place inside the cube. He used a mercury switch, which, as you may figure, uses a small amount of mercury to short two metal contacts inside the switch, completing the circuit and lighting the LED. We would suggest going with the non-mercury variety of tilt switches just to avoid any possible contamination. You know us, anything to mitigate unnecessary disasters is kind of a good route. But anyway, the die lights up a different color LED based on the orientation of the cube and it even blinks.
This is a pretty cool hack for wowing your friends at your next PCB art meet-up. We’ll probably put this in the electronics art category, so it doesn’t get lumped in with those other ever-beloved fidget toys.
I’m not really seeing the anti-stress properties. What do you DO with it? D&D? Monopoly? Let it sit in your pocket and change the battery every day? Perhaps some battery charging contacts would be a VERY good upgrade to do right away. It’s certainly pretty, but I’m not sure marketing has figured out their niche yet.
Unfortunately, he got the spots wrong.
Aren’t most dice small enough to put on a keychain?
Lol. That’s a fair point.
Wait. A thing made out of ATmega128 chips, that BLINKS LEDs? No way!
Oldie but goodie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It gets worse, the controllers are not even connected.
More circuit sculpture than PCB art. It does look nice, but I too am concerned about how long the battery would last with it in my pocket.
Circuit sculpture would be a better description. Thanks for the comment.
I once soldered a red LED to a 555 timer
Where’s my prize? Where’s my article?
Project link? Does it look cool? :)
I had once made a circuit-art type battery level indicator using LM3914, although didn’t look pretty it did work
https://hackaday.io/project/9255-a-battery-monitor-built-on-the-lm3914
Cool! That looked difficult to solder. Lol.
The dice numbers aren’t correctly placed. On a dice the sum of the opposite faces is always 7 ;)
Huh…that’s a good point. This would be helpful to point out on the Instructables page. Still a cool little design though.
Obviously not always.
“BRINGING BACK..”
Only 2010s kids will remember!