Making LED Earrings with an FPGA #FPGA #Wearables #Jewelry @ElectronutLabs
Via Electronut Labs comes a pair of beautiful hanging LED matrix earrings powered by an FPGA:
I wanted to build a pair of earrings for my wife’s birthday. Since I am learning about FPGAs these days, I wanted to incorporate one into the design. Having gotten older and wiser, I decided to enlist help early on. I would focus on the overall design and the programming part, and leave the PCB design and assembly to my trusted friend and engineer Siva.
The objective: Build a pair of LED earrings using the Lattice iCE40UP5k FPGA. The earrings would have an 8 x 8 grid of LEDs, and would be powered by a CR2032 coin cell. My wife likes to wear big earrings, so using a CR2032 was not a problem. The earrings needed to balance nicely, so the battery had to be at the bottom. After considering many crazy shapes, I settled on basic geometry – three circles intersecting slightly.
The PCB was laid out in Altium Designer. They had to use a 4-layer design due to restrictions on size and the considerable number of lines that need to be routed.
Various programs were designed in Verilog. You can see the results in the video below. For design details, visit the Electronut Labs blog here.
Are you an electronic jewelry or wearable fan? Let us know in the comments below.
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