[Greg] loves hacking his bow ties. Back in high school, he added some bright RGB LEDs to the bow tie he wore to prom and even won the male best-dressed award. Recently he decided to try another bow tie hack, this time giving his tie some retro arcade game feels.
He decided to use an ATtiny85 and to experiment doing some more lower-level programming to refresh his skills. He wrote all his libraries from scratch which really helped him learn a lot about the ATtiny in the process. This also helped him make sure his code was as efficient as possible since he had quite a bit of memory constraints using the ATtiny85 (only 512 bytes of RAM).
He designed the body of the bow tie with wood. He fit all the electronics inside the body while allowing the ATtiny to protrude out of the body giving his bow tie some wanted hacker aesthetic. Of course, he needed to access the toggle switch to play the game, so he made a slot for that as well.
Nice addition to the electronics bow tie collection on Hackaday. Really aesthetic design if you ask us. And you know how much we love retro games.
In 1984, I added blinking lights to my graduation bow tie. Microcontroller? Smart LEDs? Huh? I used a 555 and two grain of wheat bulbs dipped in red nail polish. Power was from a 9 volt battery in my breast pocket. I discovered I could put the battery clip on only one terminal with the clip rotated a bit and puff out my chest to close the contact and turn on the lights. Hands-free!
Good riddance to 1984, couldn’t even settle down to a movie without some chick throwing a hammer at the screen.
Not to mention the gin, yuck!
That bowtie shape actually looks like it’d be pretty comfortable as a controller for a console.