DIY SINGING GIFT BOX FROM TRASH (Let's Learn to Make It)

So here I am back after a long time on Instructables! A gift is an effective way to impress and show love to our loved ones. There are a lot of gifts available, but what's better than a DIY one!

I made a gift box entirely out of trash(except for few items ) which has beautiful flashing lights, can sing the name of your loved one, and has a good space for something awesome to be put into.

1. You'll Obviously need a box.
2. An Arduino Uno, and an ATmega 328 IC(with an IC base).
3. 22pF capacitors-2
4. 16 MHZ crystal oscillator
5. A lot of LED's (Colors are your choice )
6. A lot of wires
7. PAM8403 amplifier board
8. 2 small speakers
9. Zero Perf board (Optional)
10. Foam sheet (Optional)
11. Slider switch(Optional)
12. Old power bank (I found one in my scrap box!)
13. 18650 3.7V cell (I salvaged a few from an old laptop battery)
14. A push-button(Or any type of springy button, smoother the better), I got one from the old CD drive

In fact, all the parts mentioned above were from trash, even the ATmega 328 IC was from a nonworking UNO board, luckily Atmega 328 MCU IC was working well, It was the power circuit issue, I fried it LOL!

You need to measure the dimensions of the box and plan out the hardware layout first.

In my case it was a small box , so I decided to place everything on two ends,

• If you want to get the gist of this project and want to actually do a lot of soldering, then You need to cut the Zero PCB to an appropriate length so that the PCB can hold all the parts and also is of appropriate length which is comparable to the height of the box (It is important as we will be placing our momentary switch here and it should touch the flap of the box when closed.

1. Cut it to the appropriate length
2. Solder the momentary switch on the top of the board.
3. Solder all the components according to the wiring scheme :

ATmega 328 / ARDUINO UNO connections:

• Pin D0 to pin D10 to LED's
• Pin A0 to A4 to LED's
• Pin D11 to PAM 8403 amplifier Audio input (to both left and right)
• Pin A5 to momentary switch (Grounded on another end of the switch )

Take out the power bank circuit, replace the battery, because usually, the battery capacity is the issue in old power banks. I got my battery from an old laptop battery.

We also need to take off the USB connecter (Bigger one ) and solder two wires to the two end terminals which will be the supply lines for our Arduino board / ATmega 328 IC.

We also need to glue that circuit on the box such that the micro USB port is accessible from the outer of box .

You need to nicely lay down the LEDs all around the box so that when they Light up, it seems like they are laid down in a circular fashion.

I soldered ribbon wires to the LEDs with a common ground to all the LEDs and I made two such panels to be fitted on either ends of the box.

Connect each wire, the LEDs and the speakers, and everything.

Then I covered those wires by glueing another foam sheet piece so that no wires are visible.

Upload the code I provided on the Arduino UNO and take the IC out and fix it on the newly made custom PCB.

If everything went correct, you should hear the song "HAPPY BIRTHDAY Vaishnavi HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY"

But you don't want your box to say this, isn't it?

All you have to do is to generate the voice sample of whatever you want it to say(length less than 3 seconds up to 2.7 seconds is a good choice ), and convert it into a C code

After having the appropriate voice sample, save it as an UNSIGNED 8 bit PCM .wav file. You can use audacity for it

Now you need to convert this wav to a C code, for that I used wavtoCode software.

You just need to paste the generated sample code in the PROGMEM matrix, and you're done!

Here is a demo video of how it should look like.

You can put anything to be gifted in this box, like a Love letter! LOL

Hope you like this project.

Do give it a try guys, the happiness when someone gets to see a present like this is priceless!

#TRASHTOTREASURE