Earring

6 Articles

LED Matrix Earrings Show Off SMD Skills

February 21, 2024 by 12 Comments

We’ll be honest with you: we’re not sure if the use of “LED stud” in [mitxela]’s new project refers to the incomprehensibly tiny LED matrix earrings he made, or to himself for attempting the build. We’re leaning toward the latter, but both seem equally likely.

This build is sort of a mash-up of two recent [mitxela] projects — his LED industrial piercing, which contributes the concept of light-up jewelry in general as well as the power supply and enclosure, and his tiny volumetric persistence-of-vision display, which inspired the (greatly downsized) LED matrix. The matrix is the star of the show, coming in at only 9 mm in diameter and adorned with 0201 LEDs, 52 in total on a 1 mm pitch. Rather than incur the budget-busting expense of a high-density PCB with many layers and lots of blind vias, [mitexla] came up with a clever workaround: two separate boards, one for the LEDs and one for everything else. The boards were soldered together first and then populated with the LEDs (via a pick-and-place machine, mercifully) and the CH32V003 microcontroller before being wired to the power source and set in the stud.

Even though most of us will probably never attempt a build on this scale, there are still quite a few clever hacks on display here. Our favorite is the micro-soldering iron [mitxela] whipped up to repair one LED that went missing from the array. He simply wrapped a length of 21-gauge solid copper wire around his iron’s tip and shaped a tiny chisel point into it with a file. We’ll be keeping that one in mind for the future.

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Thermal Earring Tracks Body Temperature

February 13, 2024 by 11 Comments

If you want to constantly measure body temperature to track things like ovulation, you usually have to wear something around your wrist or finger in the form of a smartwatch or ring. Well, what if you can’t or don’t want to adorn yourself this way? Then there’s the thermal earring.

Developed at the University of Washington, the thermal earring is quite small and unobtrusive compared to a smartwatch. Sure, it dangles, but that’s so it can measure ambient temperature for comparison’s sake.

You don’t even need to have pierced ears  — the earring attaches to the lobe magnetically. And yeah, the earring can be decorated to hide the circuitry, but you know we would rock the bare boards.

The earring uses BLE to transmit readings throughout the day, and of course goes into sleep mode between transmissions to save power. Coincidentally, it runs for 28 days per charge, which is the length of the average menstrual cycle. While the earring at this time merely “shows promise” as a means of monitoring stress and ovulation, it did outperform a smartwatch at measuring skin temperature while the wearers were at rest.

This is definitely not the only pair of earrings we’ve got around here. These art deco earrings use flexible PCBs, and this pair will light up the night.

Electronic Earrings Are PCB Art You Can Wear

June 24, 2023 by 4 Comments

If there’s one area of the human anatomy we rarely try to draw the eye, it’s the ears. Nonetheless, [DIY GUY Chris] has developed some LED earrings that should do exactly that.

The earrings are made using PCBs as the very body of the jewelry itself. The PCBs for each ear play host to eight WS2812 LEDs in a tiny 2020 form factor. The LEDs get their instructions from an ATtiny13-A AVR microcontroller, with some further supporting hardware to get everything playing happily together. Each earring runs off a single CR1220 coin cell, which sits on the obverse side of the earring to stay out of sight. The earrings are programmed with pogo pins to avoid the need for any bulky connectors.

By virtue of the tiny addressable LEDs, the earrings are capable of displaying full RGB colors. [DIY GUY Chris] has programmed the earrings with simple color fades, as well  as some fancier chase animations as well.

We’ve seen some great PCB jewelry before, too. Video after the break.

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Flexible PCB Earrings Put The Art In Art Deco

May 24, 2020 by 5 Comments

Earrings have been a hackers’ target for electronic attachment for quite a while, but combining the needed components into a package small enough to wear in that finicky location is quite a challenge. If [Sawaiz Syed]’s Art Deco Earrings are anything to go by, ear computers have a bright future ahead of them!

This is a project unusually well described by its name. It is in fact an earring, with art deco styling. But that sells it way too short. This sliver of a flex circuit board is double sided to host an ATtiny, accelerometer, LDO, and eight 2020 formfactor controller-integrated LEDs. Of course it’s motion sensitive, reacting to the wearer’s movement via LED pattern. [Sawaiz] makes reference to wearing it while dancing, and we can’t help but imagine an entire ballroom all aglow with tiny points of LED light.

The Art Deco Earrings are also set apart by the thoroughness of their documentation (have we mentioned how much we love detailed documentation?). [Sawaiz] not only drops the source in your lap, but the README in the Github repo linked at the top walks the reader through each component of the design in detail. Plus the PCBA render is so complete it includes a model of the wire loop to fit through the wearer’s ear; how cool is that? The single piece that’s still in progress is the battery. The earring itself hosts an LDO, so all that is required is stashing a battery somewhere discrete, perhaps in the user’s hair? We’re looking forward to seeing what [Sawaiz] works out.

For the full effect, check out the gif of an assembled unit in action after the break.

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This Solar-Powered Ear Ring Turns With The Sun

June 1, 2019 by 3 Comments

Jewelry making offers many opportunities for the electronics tinkerer, and on these pages we’ve seen some eye-catching creations using LEDs to great effect. They all have the same limitation though, it’s difficult to power something that tiny without a cumbersome battery. In seeking to solve that problem there have been a variety of inventive solutions tried, but they haven’t matched the approach of [Lloyd Konneker] who has turned the whole premise of most electronic jewelry on its head.

Instead of LEDs, the party trick of his earring is an electric motor that makes it spin, and instead of giving out light it takes it in as solar power.  The motor is a pager alert device, the solar cells are repurposed photodiodes, and the power is stored in a capacitor until there is enough to drive the motor, at which point a MOSFET is triggered to do the work. It’s all made possible by a Texas Instruments TPS3839 supply voltage supervisor chip, and it works well enough to turn from time to time in bright sunlight. The prototype uses a conventional PCB, but a better version is in the works with a flexible board.

His write-up should be of interest to anyone with a need to learn about micropower circuits, as it goes into significant detail on their tuning and operation. Last year’s Hackaday Prize had an entire section devoted to energy harvesting which is well worth searching the site for, a typical example was this solar powered microcontroller board.

Light Up Earrings

October 11, 2013 by 14 Comments

light up earrings

Unfortunately [ch00f’s] been too busy to write for Hack a Day lately, but he has finished off an awesome little project — Christmas LED earrings!

As with all his projects, there is a brilliant write up that covers everything — even for the stuff that didn’t work. But what we really have to admire about this project in particular is the scale at which he was working. The tiny battery squished in between the two boards? A mere 19mAh. Which is actually enough to power the earrings for a few hours, but is only the size and thickness of a few microSD cards!

The second thing that really popped out at us was the boards themselves, there’s just no room for a programming header! To work around this [ch00f] actually made the PCBs in 3 segments, programmed it, and then cut off the programming header section! If that’s not enough ingenuity, how about this – He also included hall effect sensors on-board to turn them off while charging! Not to mention an intricate wood box to charge them in…

Stick around after the break to see the great demo video, it even has some classy music from the 1930’s which really sets the mood.

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