When it came time for Mara and I to draft our wedding ceremony we pondered how we could incorporate an element from our theme. We had 4 days to go and only some vague ideas. Mara bought some wood letters to spell out ‘I Do’ and wanted to use them in the ceremony. We also joked about using a soldering iron during the ceremony; but how could we do it tastefully? Then it hit us, a common wedding ceremony know as the “Fishermen’s Knot” could be reworded for something a little more geeky. Yes, we really did solder some wires together in the middle of our wedding, with a Weller soldering iron Mara bought me for a past birthday no less. And you won’t believe what PCBs came in handy for the build…
Video
Ok, this post will be short because this project was thrown together 4 days before the wedding and we didn’t have time to stop and document the steps. We were set to get married and still had a lot to do, as evident by the mini-maker space we created in my parents house:
Wedding Hack HQ (click to enlarge)
Mara bought the letters at a local hobby store. I sketched out a rough outline of evenly spaced LEDs and went to work creating the holes with a drill press. A coat of blank paint and then my best man Dan went to work soldering wires to all those LEDs. Next we had to figured out a way to control those LEDs. In a pleasant case of coincidence, the boards I hijacked to ask my bride to marry me 2 years ago were designed to control large numbers of LEDs. Yes, the boards that asked “Mara Will You Marry Me?” were used to run letters that said ‘I Do’ during our wedding ceremony.
Talk about coincidence!
The boards are a breakout for a inexpensive constant current shift register. Mate that with an Arduino running a SPI based PWM library and you’ve got yourself chain-able LED driver system. Dan did all the wiring while I whipped up a few driver boards. Once we had everything wired up and running the demo code I went to work programming a sequence for the display. Thanks to my Vixen-Arduino Python script, I was able to quickly choreograph a lighting sequence and embed it into the Arduino code. I did run into a new problem, turns out the AVRDude has a bug; if it encounters a whole page of FFs in the hex file, it will assume it’s already that way in the flash and skips sending it over to the Arduino. A quick change to Vixen to limit maximum brightness to 254 bypassed the bug and got me running.
During the ceremony, the final connection between the Arduino and the battery pack is made and soldered together. ‘Completing the circuit’ turns the display on and the preprogrammed sequence begins to play. This was the quickest project of the wedding and turned out to be one of the most talked about afterwords. Everyone loved the unique addition to our ceremony!
Wait, what were you wearing?
Go here to read about our geeky Wedding Attire, or here to read about the rest of our wedding hacks.
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14 Comments.
[…] Now here are some wedding vows that the Adafruit crowd can get behind — soldering a project together that lights up to say “I DO” as a metaphor for the marriage contract. Fascinating! From Bill Porter’s blog: […]
[…] Geeky Wedding – Wedding Circuit Ceremony: Bill Porter shared about some wedding vows that the Adafruit crowd can really get behind: soldering a project […]
[…] of them just couldn’t leave their soldering irons at home. The actually swore their vows by soldering together a circuit during the ceremony (blinky wedding dress, el wire tuxedo, and […]
This is the best of best and really interesting weeding I’ve ever seen!!!
Happy married life & Congratulations to Bill and Mara..!
So you were manufactured for each other and got soldered and are a completed circuit.
Wow!
That makes so much more sense than that psycho babel about two halves not making a whole.
I just love truth.
May your current never run low, your voltage remain steady and your watts continue to warm. And above all, do not hook into external sources without good, high quality capacitors. They will short your circuit.
Scott
[…] of them just couldn’t leave their soldering irons at home. The actually swore their vows by soldering together a circuit during the ceremony (blinky wedding dress, el wire tuxedo, and […]
[…] At 2.2AH, one pack lasted just long enough to make it through my reception. I also used the same battery design to power the display used in our geeky circuit ceremony. […]
Wow….I like this type of parent, then I will have lots of robotic toys to play with!!!
[…] and Mara got married in the geekiest way: They soldered as part of their vows! […]
[…] centerpieces for the reception. He and his wife [Mara] then made an appearance in a Sunday roundup tying the knot by soldering a circuit together. Surely the LED Tetris Tie would have been in the ceremony had it existed. This time, though, […]
Wow!
That makes a lot more sense than that psycho babel concerning 2 fifty percents not making a whole.
I merely enjoy reality.
May your existing never run low, your voltage remain steady and your watts continue to warm up. And above all, do not hook right into external sources without excellent, premium capacitors. They will certainly short your circuit.
Charles
It looks like someone just used your Geek Wedding page to SPAM commenters.
The message did not include an unsubscribe link so you may want to disable comments on this page to prevent any further occurrence!
Take care!
Scott
I am also a builder of exhibits for a small science museum and built a Reaction Time exhibit that I would like for you to see a photo of it along with other exhibits that I built. how can I send you photos? I also want to build a stop motion animation exhibit probably using a web cam, pi, 3 buttons, a computer, and a monitor. do you have any ideas how to make such a thing work? World of Wonders Science Museum
I like this site. Thanks for sharing this.