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Enginursday: The LoverMatic
Revisiting the venerable HaterMatic project, with a Valentine's Day twist!
Are you going to be alone this Valentine's Day? Or maybe you're searching for a way to tell that special someone how you feel? Either way, we've got you covered. For today's Enginursday post, I wanted to revisit an old favorite project of mine, the HaterMatic, with a Valentine's twist.
Meet the LoverMatic. This little baby will, for a small monetary donation, give you a compliment that's sure to make your (or your sweetheart's) day.
The construction is pretty simple. I connected one of our six-denomination coin acceptors to one of our thermal printers through an Arduino Pro Mini. The Pro Mini has all of the strings stored in flash memory, so it's capable of storing quite a few. I used a nice, big arcade button to trigger the print once the money has been received.
If you're interested in building your own LoverMatic (or HaterMatic, for that matter), all the code and wiring diagrams you'll need can be found on GitHub. It's also a great example project for interfacing the coin acceptor, the thermal printer, or for learning to store long strings in flash memory on Arduino boards.
Does the new code check to make sure it doesnt cut off a sentence in the middle of a word to print on the next line?
Sadly, no. Adding a '\n' character to the string is the easiest way to do this, as the printer will recognize that as a newline request.
Hello can you help me? My project is like this, but it does not have a button
What are the parts used to build the enclosure?
We used to sell it. It's called "MicroRax" and it's an aluminum extrusion bar system similar to 80/20. Personally, I wouldn't recommend using it, as it has a number of flaws that make it less than sturdy. I bought up a bit when we discontinued it for projects like this.