Sooo I made a useless machine for my girlfriend as a Christmas gift. 
Here's the description I wrote for the video (I don't know what else to say):
"It took me about a week to get it done, but in the end the time spent paid off.
This is my Christmas present for my girlfriend, I didn't want to buy her anything since I love making things.
Technical stuff:
It's based on Arduino, code has been written by Riachi and can be found here: http://goo.gl/03wTI6
I only made some adjustments to it so that it would work as it should on my machine.
If I were to write my own code I wouldn't have been able to meet my deadline. So big thanks to him.
Day 1: Design the box with AutoCAD
Day 2: Go to a lab and cut the pieces for the box with a lasercutter (the lasercutter was in use for most of the day by other people)
Day 3: Build my first ever standalone Arduino
Day 4: Glue everything together and test everything out with my Arduino Mega
Day 5: Find a way to program my standalone Arduino (I used the ArduinoSPI example that's inside the Arduino IDE example package)
Day 6: Make the heart-switch by hand, start spray-painting the box (first time painting MDF, no experience with it so I invested a lot of time to get it done the way I liked it and it took a whole day).
Day 7 (all-nighter!): Put everything together again, make the circuits on perfboard, fix all the problems that occured (74hc04 hex inverter didn't work properly, I thought of an alternative that was based on a pull-down resistor).
Editted the program for Arduino and then put it all back together.
Glued all the wooden characters on it to make it look nicer.
Packaged it.
PS: When programming a standalone Arduino don't forget to plug out the servo motors, as when you forget to do it you'll keep getting errors while programming and debugging will take an hour or more (happened to me)."
Here's the description I wrote for the video (I don't know what else to say):
"It took me about a week to get it done, but in the end the time spent paid off.
This is my Christmas present for my girlfriend, I didn't want to buy her anything since I love making things.
Technical stuff:
It's based on Arduino, code has been written by Riachi and can be found here: http://goo.gl/03wTI6
I only made some adjustments to it so that it would work as it should on my machine.
If I were to write my own code I wouldn't have been able to meet my deadline. So big thanks to him.
Day 1: Design the box with AutoCAD
Day 2: Go to a lab and cut the pieces for the box with a lasercutter (the lasercutter was in use for most of the day by other people)
Day 3: Build my first ever standalone Arduino
Day 4: Glue everything together and test everything out with my Arduino Mega
Day 5: Find a way to program my standalone Arduino (I used the ArduinoSPI example that's inside the Arduino IDE example package)
Day 6: Make the heart-switch by hand, start spray-painting the box (first time painting MDF, no experience with it so I invested a lot of time to get it done the way I liked it and it took a whole day).
Day 7 (all-nighter!): Put everything together again, make the circuits on perfboard, fix all the problems that occured (74hc04 hex inverter didn't work properly, I thought of an alternative that was based on a pull-down resistor).
Editted the program for Arduino and then put it all back together.
Glued all the wooden characters on it to make it look nicer.
Packaged it.
PS: When programming a standalone Arduino don't forget to plug out the servo motors, as when you forget to do it you'll keep getting errors while programming and debugging will take an hour or more (happened to me)."
