Adafruit Badges Turned Electronic Invitations

Despite what you might have heard, even the most devout Hackaday readers may eventually find themselves getting married. Should you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to send out invitations for your big day, or any other major celebration for that matter, you could do worse than follow the example [Mokas] and their partner set with these memorable electronic wedding invitations.

Inspired by the electronic badges distributed at hacker cons, [Mokas] decided to use Adafruit’ EdgeBadge and PyBadge devices to create a similar interactive keepsake that would be a bit more exciting than a piece of paper. While it would have been enough to have the wedding information pop up on the screen when they were turned on, the final invites actually boot into a retro-style game where you walk around talking to characters to uncover information about the event and the venue.

The game was created in Microsoft MakeCode Arcade, with a sprinkling of original and commissioned sprites. Early versions of the game ended up being a bit much for the Adafruit badge’s to handle, but after doing a bit of research on creating games for computationally-constrained platforms, [Mokas] was able to optimize the performance. For those that didn’t get a physical invite (no doubt ours was simply lost in the mail), you can play the whole thing right in your browser.

It’s a very clever idea, and while using custom hardware would have allowed for a more bespoke package, we can’t blame [Mokas] for wanting to keep this one simple. Getting everything ready for your wedding is already enough stress — it’s hardly the time to spin up a new board.

For a similar reasons, another Adafruit offering was selected to power the couple’s e-ink baby development display.

8 thoughts on “Adafruit Badges Turned Electronic Invitations

    1. Or you could just go down to the courthouse and get married for the cost of a license. Necessary? Maybe not, but certainly convenient when it comes to things like tax filings and power of attorney (in US at least).

    2. Until one of you gets sick and the other can’t visit or take care of hospital bills because you aren’t married and aren’t family. How about when your partner dies, and you have to move out of the house you’ve lived in together for the last 30 years because the inheritances laws passes ownership to your partner’s relatives – live-in partners don’t inherit in most places.

      Sucks, but it is true.

    1. Adafruit makes nice stuff, but they decided a while back to unnecessarily espouse a political agenda. I’m not going to say what it is, but it’s not hard to figure out. Maybe that annoyed people, maybe not, I don’t know. It’s too bad they felt the need to do this, because their products are pretty nice for what they are. I bought an EdgeBadge a few years ago and one of the first things I did with it was roll my own Nervous Text app to make a simple name tag for FanCon.

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