The Inspirer Keeps Your Mood Up With Inspirational Quotes And Soothing Music

A wooden device with an LED display and speakers

While some people enjoy the cold weather and long, dark nights in the Northern Hemisphere these days, others may find it hard to keep a positive mindset all through the winter. [Michael Wessel] decided he needed to do something about that and came up with The Inspirer, a desktop display that shows inspirational quotes and plays soothing music.

The design is deliberately bare-bones: a strip of wood, standing upright thanks to two metal brackets, onto which a bunch of components have been screwed, glued and taped. The actual display consists of a row of 14-segment LED modules that can show basic alphanumeric characters; these displays emit white light, but [Michael] added a red color filter in front to give them a more “retro” look.

This device is fully off-grid, so no Internet connection issues will disrupt your flow. A huge database of quotes and a selection of music tracks are stored on a pair of micro SD cards; an MP3 player module handles the music while an Arduino picks a quote, drives the display, and reads the buttons. You can select quotes based on a certain theme: examples include friendship, gardening, money, and love. But if you’re open to anything, you can just set it to “random” and get something from any of the 120 categories.

[Michael]’s simple and straightforward design should hopefully prove inspirational to many hardware enthusiasts. But if you’re looking for something more advanced, we featured a neat pomodoro timer that displays quotes a few weeks ago. Of course, this being Hackaday, we’ve also seen a clock based on literary quotes.

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