I had this neat idea to promote my blog site (that you are reading right now) as well as demonstrate some of the capabilities I have mastered to date. I can't say the idea is all original, I was inspired by reading the instructables article here by an author known simply as 'Sponges' located here
I guess could have fabricated it out of my house the way he did, but I have really taken a liking to eagle cad and batchPCB, and my design was going to be a bit more complex. My project would have more LEDs as well as a more advanced microchip. Unfortunately this has driven my cost up a little higher then his, but for the features I wanted to include, this was acceptable. Also, I am also not yet familiar with the PIC family of microprocessors. The purpose of this project was to hone my SMT soldering skills. The first board I assembled wasn't too bad, but by my 3rd, I think i now have the technique pretty much mastered. Here are some pictures of the boards in various phases of assembly.
Here is a video demo of one of these in action.
These boards were part of a small test run to mainly ensure I didn't have any design flaws. I have amended some of the text on the card, mainly changed the url to www.damage.cc since I now have that domain. I am going to commission Gold Phoenix PCB Fab house to make up some of these with blue soldermask and white silkscreen. Also, stay tuned, in a few months I am going to unveil an alternate version of these with slightly different electronics on it. These will be a "Geek/Hacker" variant. I just finalized the design last night, I ordered a small run for test, and if they test out, I'll order a production run.
I need to clean up my source code a bit, but If there is any interest, I will publish all the source material time permitting.