The Hackster Badge

Beware flashing images in the video below:

The Idea

First up thanks to Elegoo for sending me one of their Diffused and Clear Assorted LED packs!

I’ve been using the site Hackster for just over 2 years now, my first project uploaded to there was my Windows 98 Wrist Watch, I’ve also had some help from Elegoo recently with my Scorpion Robot Project.

I asked Elegoo for the above LED kit to make something with and review and I thought I could make a Hackster Badge with their logo on, as a thank you to them for spreading word about my projects as well as give Elegoo more attention to their awesome products!

Key Goals:

• Make a wearable with the Hackster logo.
• Make it flash cool patterns.

Stuff

• Arduino Pro Mini
• Elegoo LED Kit
• Protoboard
• Wire
• Coin Cell Battery Holder
• CR2032 Batteries
• Safety Pin

Build

The first part was to order the LED’s into the Hackster logo:

Next up was wiring up all the positive LED pins to the holes where the digital pins of the Arduino would be as well as wiring ground, I wired the LED's to the digital pins

like in this tutorial

(except I did not use resistors):

Then I soldered in the Arduino, I had to use wires to get it connected to the board as the Arduino would not fit with pins over the wires:

Finally I hot glued on the battery holder and put a lot of hot glue over the wires to secure them:

And the final look of the front:

And finally adding on a pin to the back to make it a badge:

Code

Once the badge was build and the soldering all finally done, I created code that would do a flashy animation to light up the logo and hold it for a while before repeating the animation.

As I hadn’t kept track of what LED’s were going to what pins I had to manually find the pins to LED’s and note them down:

Once I’d figured out the order to light the LED’s in the way I wanted I made the code which you can grab from my GitHub.

Flashy

Beware flashing images in the video below:

Looks really good and super bright! I highly recommend the resistor kit from Elegoo – with 600 LED’s in the box it will be a while before I have to purchase any more.

In the video I say I’m not sure how long the batteries will last – I noticed on editing at some points the badge appears to be breaking the pattern, I think this is where the batteries are going and restarting the board.

Conclusion

I’m happy with this project and I hope that Elegoo and Hackster like it too!

The main takeaway from this for me is that I should plan wiring a bit better as well as note what pins go to what LED – for future projects this would make it easier for knowing what pins will light up from what digital output.

But the end result is a cool looking and bright wearable!

Let me know what you thought and see you next time.