Ambient Light Gift Badge

After Christmas I was in the situation that my nephew's birthday celebration came near. I asked him if he had a special on his wish list and he told me that he doesn't have a wish at all, for the moment. He still had not played with every toy he got for christmas. We decided it would be best if I gave him gift certificate that he could use later in the year. Hmmmm .... I don't like those cards that have no personality, and I gave it a thought.

After a while I thought about a coin, that he could use as a gift badge. I decided to make this coin out of a copper pcb. I liked to etch some text out of it. Then I saw an old and broken cooling fan lying on my desk and remembered that I had some high power RGB LED in my parts collection.

After some search in the Internet I decided to build an ambilight device with the etched coin backlit by the RGB LED.

I was somehow limited to the microprocessor. I had an spare ATTiny13, and did not want to use to much control buttons. Everything should be simple. I found this software http://www.loetstelle.net/projekte/moodlight/moodlight.php . Markus used an ATTiny12, but it was easy to adapt his code to the ATTiny13.

Step 1 Parts needed

You need a case to put all thing into. I used the case from a broken cooling fan of a servers power supply. The fan was a 40mm fan marked as GM1204PQV1-8A. The speciality of this fan is the rather long tubing of the case. The case is made of two parts. One holding the fan and the other being simply a tube.
- I found some insulation material inside the broken power supply.
- A heat sink taken from an old motherboard fits into the case, if the edges are cut a little bit.
- Some time ago I bought a rubber cap for push buttons from DealExtreme.
- The ATTiny13 (or ATTiny12).
- some resistors and capacitors
- some small wires
- a small push button
- silicone paste to mount the RGB-LED onto the heat sink
- a small 5V power supply (a 3V coin cell battery may do as well ... for some time)
- old pingpong ball
- some acrylic
- etching pcb's
- the ability to etch pcb's
- plastic spray, PLASTIK 70, to seal the badge
- tools like soldering iron, pliers, screwdrivers ...

Comments

[Wesley666]

German I see... :D

[frickelkram]

How did you find out ... ;-)

[Wesley666]

I saw the writing on the front, and I dabble...Taking German 30 right now...but not nearly enough to really know anything...I am better at reading then listening as well...