Make a Birthday Sign for My Dog To Celebrate His Birthday

Since childhood, I have been fond of dogs, especially the large dog golden Retriever, which can provide company and security, so I decided to raise a golden retriever after leaving school.

So on March 12, 2022, he brought home his favorite golden hairs from the pet store and named him Zhi Shu, which is a homonym for "Arbor Day" in Chinese.This is what he looked like at the pet store.

Now it is December, and it will be Zhi Shu's first birthday soon, so I decided to make a birthday lamp to celebrate him.This is what he looks like now.

He should be happy (haha, just I think)

The main functions envisaged for the birthday sign include:

• There is a golden hair outline similar to the light belt, and other elements of birthday wishes
• When the dog is within 50cm of the light sign: the light sign will automatically play the Happy Birthday song
• When the dog is within 60cm of the light plate: the light belt of the light plate will flicker with a frequency of 2s/ time
• The dog laughs happily

With that in mind, I started to choose the materials I needed to make these.

Because XIAO series development board is small in size, rich in functions, and can connect multiple Grove interface sensors through a special extension version, easy to use, I decided to use seeed studio's XIAO development board and Grove series sensors to make the birthday sign. The specific selection can be found in the hardware material list.

After receiving the materials, I started to make them.

The production process is as follows.

• Step 1: Connect XIAO development board and expansion board, add XIAO rnf52840 in Arduino ide, after installation, use BLINK to test whether it can work normally.

• Step 2: Connect each Grove module in turn to test whether it can work properly alone.

• Step 3: Connect all the 3 Grove modules to XIAO extension board and write programs to realize the functions required by this project.

• Step 4: After all the materials are connected, fixed on a clean board, finishing the shape of the light belt（Finally decided to draw a Frozen Princess Elsa, plus the production of these）, so that the layout is beautiful.

• Step 5: Power on and celebrate the puppy's birthday.

Part of the project code is as follows:

Finally

As a beginner, this project took 3 days from the beginning to the actual implementation function. It looks good. Let me think about what to do in the next project.