Make an LED-Lit PCB Flower for Your Valentine

Beauty and the Beast meets cyberpunk.

Cameron Coward
5 years ago

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, which means you’re probably getting showered with ads telling you to buy your significant other some expensive piece of jewelry that only holds value because of social pressure and wildly-successful marketing from De Beers. If you’re lucky, your partner doesn’t actually want expensive jewelry, and only wants to know you care. If that’s the case, Vyudin’s LED-lit PCB flower is a far more thoughtful gift.

This PCB flower is, presumably, designed to look like the glass-encased rose from Beauty and the Beast. So, that’s pretty romantic. The flower itself is made up of eight individual PCBs: six for the petals, one for the center, and one for a leaf. All of those are lit by SMD LEDs, and each has its own ATtiny85 microcontroller. Vyudin’s current code just turns on all of the LEDs through Charlieplexing, but you can adapt it to animate the LEDs if you like.

To follow along with Vyudin’s tutorial and build one yourself, you’ll need to order a half-dozen ATtiny85 SMD chips, 72 SMD 0603 LEDs, and have the PCBs fabricated. The PCBs will all come on a single sheet, so you’ll have to use a Dremel to cut them out. Then, just solder the components to the PCBs and solder the PCBs together with wires. Use thick power wires to act as the stem of the flower. Optionally, you can use an old green PCB you have laying around as the grass, and put the whole thing in a glass case to make it look extra special for Valentine’s Day.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist.
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