Hackable Microcontroller-Powered Valentine's Card

compumike writes "If you have a significant other to impress this Valentine's Day, consider putting your programming skills to use. This video tutorial shows how to build an LED Heart Valentine's card, powered by a microcontroller running C code, with a neat randomized 'twinkling' effect in an interrupt handler. Think about it: how many ladies can say that their Valentine's card runs at 14 MHz?"

Comments

pfftt...

[djupedal]

>"...how many ladies can say that their Valentine's card runs at 14 MHz?"

How many want to?

Make her a dinner reservation instead

[piltdownman84]

Only a really 'special' girl is going to be impressed by this. The only thing a girl wants you to make for Valentines day is a dinner reservation.

Re:Make her a dinner reservation instead

[pla]

I'm not a girl, but I'm surprised that drivel like yours gets modded up at all, much less to +5.

Politically Incorrect or not, I expect that I got modded up because most people (males, at least - which happen to form the vast majority of Slashdotters) can strongly identify with my statements.


but what I *do* know is that there are a large number to which this does NOT apply.

Oh, no doubt! Very few unqualified generalizations hold true universally; you'll get no disagreement from me on that point. But let's not play semantic games, you understood my intended point.


I don't even want to get to your misogyny here

Okay, there, you need to back up a bit. In no way did I claim females as inferior to males. In this particular instance, I don't even claim them as all that different than males (hey, I'll admit it, I care about results, not the process of getting to the result). As for the implied self-deception, we all have lies we tell ourselves; I merely pointed out a particular one that seems predominantly female in nature. If you believe that makes me a misogynist, well, you have a right to your own opinion.

Re:More Likely Responses

[interstellar_donkey]

More like

HimYeah babe, your Valentine's Day card runs at 14 MHZ!
HerI think we should see other people.

Re:Come now

[daveime]

Damn, you mentioning 555's takes me back ... in 1981 when I was just 13 years old, I got a little project published in Everyday Electronics, on just such a premise ... an oscillator made from two gates of a 4001 feeding into a 1 of 6 counter (4022 ?) and 6 LEDs cycling in sequence. I'd abandoned the 555 in favour of the NOR gates as it was bloody unstable and used to do horrible things to the power supply.

I got paid 12 pounds for getting that published, which was like a kings ransom for a 13 year old.

Microcontroller pfft ... can you say overkill ?

Re:Submitter forgot to mention it costs $79.99 + S

[gunnk]

All things considered... $80 is not a bad price.

The kits are for people that are interested in getting started with microcontroller-based projects. Do you remember just how hard it can be to figure out where to start?

Well-documented projects, all the components you need, support -- for $80 that sounds like a steal!

Yes, you can get the parts much cheaper, but this isn't about buying the parts.

If you really do want something a little cheaper you can get started with an Arduino board and browse the various guides (disclaimer: I wrote one there) on getting started. However, you are still going to spend $50 including a decent breadboard, components, etc.

For an all-inclusive getting started kit, $80 seems very reasonable to me.

A little overkill...

[gillbates]

You can get the sequential LEDs pattern with a simple shift register (74HC574 can be wired for this) and a 555 timer. If you want to add randomness, you can add a few xor gates (74HC86) to make a linear feedback shift register. So far, that's less than a dollar of IC's, and no programming required.

I've done this!

[fliptout]

Three times. I did not exactly make a card- two times I made a board with a PIC and a 2*16 LCD, the third time I simply coopted a spare Renesas dev board. All I did was display some message on the LCD. And the girls LOVED it. You can never discount how much the girls will love something you take the time to make- girls do dig the geeky stuff.