Devlog 001 – The Prototype

(another) dumb idea

Last night, I was visited by the demon of spontaneous irresponsibility. I hopped out of bed at almost 2AM and decided I really wanted to build a doorbell. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know either. I also wanted it to have a screen and display stupid messages.

Issue is, my MP3 player is sitting on my desk, still covered in solder from my last spectacular idea. So my doorbell idea turned into a door mounted light up display.

The idea became to have one pushbutton for when I’m unavailable and one for when I am. When the pushbutton is pressed, it displays a random message on the LCD display for either available or unavailable.

Example Messages included:
“gtfo <3”
“unavailable”
“prolly sleeping”

so I got to work.

the build (prototype)

The actual building part of my example prototype was easy. I used a spare arduino nano, a 16x2 LCD display (from a kit I got 2 years ago, that I never used- sorry grandma), a 5V power supply module, and a couple tiny pushbuttons.

I quickly threw it all together on a breadboard. The wiring was chaos, but it was 2 in the morning so I’m not even sure I noticed.
The only hitch I faced was that I didn’t have the necessary potentiometer for one of the LCD display pins. I ended up using a 2 resistor voltage divider (ty google ily <3).

As soon as the wiring was done, it was time for

coding

i hate it. oh gosh i hate it so much. actually the bane of my existence. It took me an hour to write a simple program. hit me up if you’re willing to live in my closet and write code for me <3.

next steps

For some reason I actually really like the idea of a door mounted DND sign/status updates.

What I’ll probably do next is:

• Add more messages
• Solder it to get it all off of the prototype board
• Design a case for it all
• Add a sensor so the display only turns on when someone is at the door
• Maybe add a remote control system (probably radio) by which I can control the messages from my desk

thanks for reading