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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Hackaday Links: February 15, 2015

February 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Matthias Wandel], also known as the genius/demigod that can make anything out of wood, put together a mount for a Raspberry Pi and a camera. Yes, it’s just a holder for a Raspi, but some of our readers who aren’t up to speed with [Matthias] might want to check out his Youtube channel. There are hundreds of awesome videos. Report back in a month.

[Evan], the guy working his butt off for the MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, and the organizer for the Vintage Computer Festival East (we’re going, April 17-19, Wall, NJ) has been working on a book. It’s about mobile computing, and he’s crowdfunding it.

Your keyboard has buttons, and so does and Akai MPC. Daft PunKonsole! Press the space bar for instrumental part. There is, as yet, no video of someone doing this correctly.

Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and that means Valentine’s Day builds started rolling in on the tip line. Here’s something that’s actually a very simple circuit that’s inspired from an old ‘Electronic Games and Toys’ book by [Len Buckwalter]. Here’s a video of it in action.

A few years ago the name of the game was tiny, credit card-sized ARM boards. It had to come to this: a 64-bit board. ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2GHz. It also costs $120 and only has a gig of RAM, but there you go.

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” →

Hackaday Links: January 26, 2014

January 26, 2014 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

The automotive industry is rolling more and more tech into their offerings. This is great for us because replacement or salvaged parts are great for projects. Here’s one component to look for. [MikesElectricStuff] tears apart the thermal imaging camera form an Audi. [via Hacked Gadgets]

Give your valentine an analog love note on the big day. [Tom’s] LED heart chaser design does it without any coding. It’s a 555 timer with CD4017 decade counter. The nice thing about the setup is a trimpot adjusts the chaser speed.

[Jan] is overclocking his Arduino to 32 MHz. For us that’s kind of an “eh” sort of thing. But his statement that you need to use a clock generator because the chip won’t work with an oscillator at that frequency raised an eyebrow. We saw an AVR chip running from a 32MHz crystal oscillator in the RetroWiz project from yesterday. So do we have it wrong or does [Jan]? Share your opinion in the comments.

Download a copy of the Apple II DOS source code… legally. Yay for releasing old code into the wild! The Computer History Museum has the DOS source code and a bunch of interesting history about it. [via Dangerous Prototypes]

While we were prowling around DP for the last link we came across [Ian’s] post on a new version of Bus Pirate cables. We’ve got the old rainbow cables which are pretty convenient. But if you’ve used them you’ll agree, hunting for the correct color for each connection isn’t anywhere near a fool-proof method. The new cable uses shrink tube printed with probe labels. They sound like a huge pain to manufacture. But this makes connections a lot easier. In our experience, when it doesn’t work its always a hardware problem! Hopefully this will mean fewer botched connections.

Make your tiny LiPo cells last longer. Not capacity wise, but physically. The delicate connections to the monitor PCB break easily, and the plug is really hard to connect and disconnect. [Sean] shows how he uses electrical tape for strain relief, and a bit of filing to loosen up the connector.

KerbalEdu: Kerbal Space Program for education. That’s right, you can play Kerbal as part of school now. Some may shake their heads at this, but school should be fun. And done right, we think gaming is a perfect way to educate. These initiatives must be the precursor to A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer method of education. Right?

Walkalong Heart Glider

January 14, 2014 by James Hobson 10 Comments

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[Darcy Whyte] is a bit of a paper plane aficionado, so in preparation for this year’s Valentine’s day (that’s one month from today!) he’s created a flying Walkalong heart glider you can make yourself!

First off, what’s a Walkalong glider? Well, it’s a type of toy airplane made out of a light material with geometry that allows for a very slow descent — one that can be extended almost indefinitely if you walk behind it to create a slight draft. [Darcy] has made a whole bunch of these in all different shapes and sizes, and even got to fly them around the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum for a Walkalong Glider Meetup!

He’s since created the do it yourself Walkalong heart glider which can easily fit inside a card for a very unique Valentine’s memento. It does require a foam cutter to make, but [Darcy] also has plans on his site for a DIY hot-wire foam cutter that costs less than $10 to build!

It’s a cute little project — stick around after the break to see how it’s done!

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Heart-shaped Project Takes No Shortcuts

June 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

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If all [Blake] wanted to do is scroll “Blake loves Kim” on some LEDs he could have stopped with the breadboard version of the project. Or hastily craft a cardboard heart around the marquee. But he really just used this heart-shaped electronics project as an excuse to get his feet wet with several different types of manufacturing.

The project started as a simple scrolling message pendant. Something along these lines. His very small LED module was being driven by an ATtiny85. He planned to run it from battery which is a perfect excuse to learn how to use the sleep functions built into the chip.

The initial design worked so well he decided to lay out his own circuit board. This made it quite simple to add in a side-positioned button to wake from sleep, and a coin cell battery holder on the back. He used OSH Park for board manufacturing — good thing they allow creative board outlines. To protect the circuitry he also ordered laser-cut acrylic plates that work in conjunction with stand offs to form a case.

He mentions he missed his Valentine’s Day delivery date by a long shot. But that’s how these sort of things go, right?

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Valentine’s Puzzle Box Makes You Work For What’s Inside

February 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

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Here’s a new take on a gift box which has been locked from the inside. I doesn’t rely on GPS coordinates or a real-time clock to unfasten the latch. Instead, the box itself acts as a puzzle. You follow the visual and audio clues, turning the box along three axes in order to input the unlock code.

There are three different difficulty settings. The easiest uses the LED heart to indicate which direction to turn the box next. This is accompanied by a beep for correct or a longer tone for incorrect movements. On the medium setting you can only go by the tones, but once you screw up the lights will aid you in getting back to where you where when making the mistake. The impossible setting doesn’t use the lights at all.

[Matt] took inspiration from some reverse geocache projects featured here on Hackaday. He already had an STM32F3 Discovery board on hand which he received as a sample. It’s driving all of the electronics inside, with the on-board gyroscope as the input device. Don’t miss the video after the break to see how well the thing works.

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