Valentine’s Heart With Awesome Animations

February 3, 2017 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

January has drawn to a close, and for many of you that means: “Oh no! Less than two weeks’ time until Valentine’s day.” But for us here at Hackaday, it means heart-themed blinky projects. Hooray!

[Dmitry Grinberg] has weighed in with his version of the classic heart-shaped LED ring. It’s hard to beat the BOM on this one: just a microcontroller, five resistors, and twenty LEDs. The rest is code, and optionally putting the name of your beloved into the copper layer. Everything is there for you to download.

Continue reading “Valentine’s Heart With Awesome Animations” →

Simple ECG Proves You Aren’t Heartless After All

November 7, 2016 by Al Williams 13 Comments

We don’t think of the human body as a piece of electronics, but a surprising amount of our bodies work on electricity. The heart is certainly one of these. When you think about it, it is pretty amazing. A pump the size of your fist that has an expected service life of nearly 100 years.

All that electrical activity is something you can monitor and–if you know what to look for–irregular patterns can tell you if everything is OK in there. [Ohoilett] is a graduate student in the biomedical field and he shares some simple circuits for reading electrocardiogram (ECG) data. You can see a video fo the results, below.

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Magic 8 Of Hearts Plies Your True Love With Cheesy Sayings

February 14, 2016 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here’s a project out of the LVL1 hackerspace in Louisville that should warm the heart of that special someone in your life. Behold the Magic 8 of Hearts.

The metaphors are somewhat mixed here, what with the heart-shaped box, the mysterious black window of a Magic 8-ball, and the cheesy once-a-year sayings like those printed on Sweethearts candies. [JAC_101] began surgery by punching a hole in the plastic heart for an OLED display. The white on black display evokes the Magic 8-Ball look, although adding a blue filter would have nailed it. A 3-axis accelerometer detects shaking motion and an Arduino Nano selects a message to display. Some white LEDs light up the enclosure and add a little pizzazz. As a bonus, the whole thing is inductively charged – no extra holes needed in this heart.

If your true love would appreciate something a little flashier, try this animated LED Valentine heart. And if you’re successful in your romantic endeavors, you might just find yourself building these ultra-geeky wedding invitations.

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Baby Saved By Doctors Using Google Cardboard After 3D Printer Fails

January 8, 2016 by Dan Maloney 64 Comments

It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. Doctors tell you that your baby is sick and there’s nothing they can do. Luckily though, a combination of hacks led to a happy ending for [Teegan Lexcen] and her family.

When [Cassidy and Chad Lexcen]’s twin daughters were born in August, smaller twin [Teegan] was clearly in trouble. Diagnostics at the Minnesota hospital confirmed that she had been born with only one lung and half a heart. [Teegan]’s parents went home and prepared for the inevitable, but after two months, she was still alive. [Cassidy and Chad] started looking for second opinions, and after a few false starts, [Teegan]’s scans ended up at Miami’s Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, where the cardiac team looked them over. They ordered a 3D print of the scans to help visualize possible surgical fixes, but the 3D printer broke.

Not giving up, they threw [Teegan]’s scans into Sketchfab, slapped an iPhone into a Google Cardboard that one of the docs had been playing with in his office, and were able to see a surgical solution to [Teegan]’s problem. Not only was Cardboard able to make up for the wonky 3D printer, it was able to surpass it – the 3D print would only have been the of the heart, while the VR images showed the heart in the context of the rest of the thoracic cavity.[Dr. Redmond Burke] and his team were able to fix [Teegan]’s heart in early December, and she should be able to go home in a few weeks to join her sister [Riley] and make a complete recovery.

We love the effect that creative use of technology can have on our lives. We’ve already seen a husband using the same Sketchfab tool to find a neurologist that remove his wife’s brain tumor. Now this is a great example of doctors doing what it takes to better leverage the data at their disposal to make important decisions.

Animated LED Valentine Heart

February 13, 2015 by Rick Osgood 3 Comments

With only a week left until Valentine’s day, [Henry] needed to think on his feet. He wanted to build something for his girlfriend but with limited time, he needed to work with what he had available. After scrounging up some parts and a bit of CAD work, he ended up with a nice animated LED Valentine heart.

[Henry] had a bunch of WS2812 LEDs left over from an older project. These surface mount LED’s are very cool. They come in a small form factor and include red, green, and blue LEDs all in a single package. On top of that, they have a built-in control circuit which makes each LED individually addressable. It’s similar to the LED strips we’ve seen in the past, only now the control circuit is built right into the LED.

Starting with the LEDs, [Henry] decided to build a large animated heart. Being a stickler for details, he worked out the perfect LED placement by beginning his design with three concentric heart shapes. The hearts were plotted in Excel and were then scaled until he ended up with something he liked. This final design showed where to place each LED.

The next step was to design the PCB in Altium Designer. [Henry’s] design is two-sided with large copper planes on either side. He opted to make good use of the extra copper surface by etching a custom design into the back with his girlfriend’s name. He included a space for the ATMega48 chip which would be running the animations. Finally, he sent the design off to a fab house and managed to get it back 48 hours later.

After soldering all of the components in place, [Henry] programmed up a few animations for the LEDs. He also built a custom frame to house the PCB. The frame includes a white screen that diffuses and softens the light from the LEDs. The final product looks great and is sure to win any geek’s heart. Continue reading “Animated LED Valentine Heart” →

TweetHeart Shows You Some Love

January 11, 2015 by Rick Osgood 4 Comments

[Stacey] wanted a more interesting way to monitor events related to her Twitter account. What she ended up with is a beautiful animated heart light.

She started out by designing the enclosure. Having access to a laser cutter, she opted to make it out of thin plywood. [Stacey] used an online tool called BoxMaker to design the actual box. The tool is very simple to use. You simply plug in the dimensions of the box and it will provide you with a two dimensional template you can use with your laser cutter. The resulting plywood pieces fit together like a puzzle. The heart piece is made from frosted acrylic and was also cut by the laser.

To light up the heart, [Stacey] opted to use NeoPixels. These are like many of the RGB LED strips we’ve seen in the past, though the pixel density is higher than most. She cut up the LED strip into the appropriate sizes and glued them to a piece of plywood in a rough heart shape. She tested the lights during each step so she would know exactly when any errors were made.

[Stacey] opted to use a SparkCore to control the LEDs. This had the advantage of including WiFi connectivity out of the box. [Stacey] started with NeoPixel example programs, but quickly realized they all relied on the Delay function. This was a problem for her, because she needed to constantly watch for new Twitter events. She ended up having to write her own functions that relied on interrupts instead.

[Stacey] then wrote a Node.js script to monitor twitter and control the Spark. The script watches for specific events, such as one of [Stacey’s] tweets being re-tweeted, or a user unfollowing [Stacey]. The script then sends a message to the Spark to tell it which event just occurred. The Spark will then repeat the event until a new one occurs. Check out the demonstration video below. Continue reading “TweetHeart Shows You Some Love” →

Heart-shaped Heart Simulator

July 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Heart

A few years ago, [Addie] over at Tymkrs put together a spooky little Halloween project: a small Propeller board that emulates the electrical signals in a heart. As a cardiac nurse, she thought her project could use a little improvement, and after two years she’s finally done. It’s a heart-shaped board that simulates electrical signals moving through the heart.

There are several key areas that conduct electrical signals through the heart – the sinoatrial node, atrioventricular node, and bundle branches all work like players in an orchestra to keep a heart beating like it should. If something goes wrong with one of these, the heart goes into tachycardia or fibrillation – not good, by any measure. [Addie]’s board simulates all the different ways a heart can go wrong with LEDs standing in for the electrical signals in a real heart. The name of the game here is to look at the LEDs and tell what state the heart is in.

The PCB heart is just one part of [Addie]’s heart simulator. The simulated heart can also plug into a neat little heart-shaped project box wired up with a solenoid, LCD display, headphone jack, and other electronics to turn this electronic heart into a complete study tool for heart rhythms. The nurses in [Addie]’s unit love the thing, and it looks like [Addie] might have a real cardiac training tool on here hands here.

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