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

More Likely Responses

[Arthur Grumbine]

Him: Yeah, babe, and now you can tell your friends that your Valentine's Day card runs at 14 MHz.
Her: Really?! 14? How many songs does that mean it can hold?

or
Him: Yeah, babe, and now you can tell your friends that your Valentine's Day card runs at 14 MHz.
Her: ...uh, yeah... I'll be doing that right away...

or
Him: Yeah, babe, and now you can tell your friends that your Valentine's Day card runs at 14 MHz.
Her: ...
(She remains as silent as all other RealDolls)

Re:More Likely Responses

[Sepiraph]

Think about it: how many ladies can say that their Valentine's card runs at 14 MHz?"

Clearly this is a trick question. No such girlfriend ever existed in the first place.

Re:More Likely Responses

[narcberry]

Considering my wife came across an electronics project I made, didn't care what it was or how much work it cost and threw it away.. I'm probably not going to spend hours and hours making a valentines day card twinkle...

Re:More Likely Responses

[Arthur Grumbine]

And that's why it's currently +5 funny. I know my audience.

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:More Likely Responses

[moosesocks]

OK, but bear with me..... assume a spherical girlfriend of uniform density.....

Re:More Likely Responses

[pacificleo]

Why would someone want a girlfriend with uniform density . you need to have standard deviation and make a bell curve at appropriate places .

Re:More Likely Responses

[az1324]

or
Him: ...14 MHz.
Her: At least something knows how to oscillate around here.

Re:More Likely Responses

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy, just imagine the average American woman.

Re:More Likely Responses

[Alvare]

Him: Yeah [...] 14 MHz.
Her: ... a microcontroller ... huh ... I made you this valentine robot with a couple multi-core processors, AI and Python-plug-in capable, but's okay...

Re:More Likely Responses

[noidentity]

Him: Yeah, babe, and now you can tell your friends that your Valentine's Day card runs at 14 MHz.
Her: Yeah, like I want them to know that you suck at coding and need 14 million cycles per second just to blink a few lights.

pfftt...

[djupedal]

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

How many want to?

Invalid XHTML

[XanC]

That's the least page I can remember bearing a "Valid XHTML" logo at the bottom. Ugh.

Overclock it?

[canatech]

I bet with liquid cooling you could get it to 18MHz!

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]

And yes, I'm female. Really.

No offense, but what "real" females - shallow or not - say and what they mean differ drastically. I don't think this involves lying so much as simple self-delusion (since they seem to actually believe what they say), but it all ends up the same.

Simple example - Would you rather get a blinking card that represents a week's work from your SO, or a mere half-day's pay worth of roses delivered conspicuously to your workplace?

And before you answer, I've tried both (well, not a blinking card, but same idea). The "lovingly crafted with my own hands and dozens of hours of hard work" gift gets a "gee, thanks, how... nice". The large bundle of dying plant debris result in a tigress throwing you to the floor and a few hours of scratch-mark-leaving entertainment.

Women want stuff and attention, and as much of it as possible. They don't care about the effort or intent involved, just the end product.

Re:Make her a dinner reservation instead

[littlesparrow]

no, don't mod this Informative. This is bunk. Not all of us girls want stuff (well, I admit, there IS a lot of girls who do). But there are quite a few of us too, who want 'effort'. There's a difference. And I for one, like the blinking card. Finding it was coded by my sweetie would induce lots of lusty ideas. Any idiot can make reservations.

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:Come now

[iocat]

It's not too geeky, it's too PATHETIC. If you need a microcontroller running at 14Mhz and C code to blink some heart shaped LEDs, you should just turn in nerd card now. It's like using an anvil to hammer a picture hanging nail.

If you can't create that card with a 555 and a couple resistors, I wouldn't be surprised to see your Valentine laugh in your face and go off with a real He-Man who writes assembly.

Christ! A 14Mhz microcontroller... if you're gonna use that, the damn card better access the internet or play NES games at least.

Something more simple

[hack slash]

If you want to make a special card which lights up, I saw this great little project close to christmas and so I made 9 cards, but instead of watch batteries that would die after a week or so I wired in resistors & USB plugs (strangely the only place I can find solderable USB plugs online/offline is from Maplins!), all the recipients loved them and most wondered how the blinking flip they were lit up.

Edge lit holiday cards (the snowflake one looks much better with a black background & two blue LEDs, one at the top & other at the bottom)

Next christmas I'm going to have to make something even better - anyone have any simple circuit designs on using an LED as a light sensor and then making some more LEDs react by blinking?

Possible danger

[interstellar_donkey]

She might attempt to do something similar for next month's "guy" version of Valentine's Day.

Then again, that might work out well.

Re:not impressed

[princessproton]

Soo...um...are you seeing anybody?

nerdkits

[LS]

these guys seem to have a decent piece of the slashvertisement market recently...

Most Likely Response

[az1324]

Her: That's NOT the kind of crystal I had in mind.

Real Men

[zude]

A) Real men don't build a circuit with an 14Mhz ATmega, when a couple of 555's and a few TTL counters would have sufficed.

B) Real men don't program micro-controllers in C (or, god forbid, BASIC), when a hundred or so assembly instructions would have sufficed.

C) Real men don't give their wives goofy hand-made electronic crap on Valentine's Day, because they know their wives will figuratively and possibly literally beat the shit out of them thus belying that whole 'real man' thing.

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 ?

Not what she'd want

[Big Hairy Ian]

14Mhz??????

Personaly I'm sure she'd want something that ran at 150hz (approx)

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Re:Come now

[f0rk]

It's like using an anvil to hammer a picture hanging nail.

I don't get it...

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.