Gender Reveal Project

So I made a thing for my girlfriend’s(soon to be wife heh) and my Gender Reveal Party. The point of it being it allowed our friends to “cast a vote” on what they thought the gender of the baby was AND a nifty way to reveal it. This was made using my K40 running on a Smoothieboard 4xC and using Lightburn and Inkscape. It turned out to be a huge hit!
Items used were:
-3mm birch plywood, bought off Amazon
-3mm acrylic, just some scrap I had.
-4-lead wire typically used for stepper motors, sourced off of Wish.com
-SK6812 RGBW LED chips (the white part actually made it a bit more dificult)
-Hot Glue
-Generic pushbutton, latching. Got off of Wish.com
-Generic female DC jack
-1000uF 35v Capacitor on power input to prevent fluctuation of LEDs. Had a spare lying around.
-220ohm resistors on the 2 data lines for the LEDs
-Arduino Nano with BOB, sourced off of Wish.com
-heat shrink for any exposed connections
-Misc. wood screws to close the back
and plenty of patience!

I started by cutting the main words(top piece), and cutting the letters out for “boy” and “girl”. I also cut these letters out of acrylic and glued them in to their wooden counterpart. I also cut out the gaps with acrylic for more light to shine through. I then cut an offset piece for the edge lighting effect approx. 4mm wide. The 4 small diamonds in the “vote area” also have small acrylic lenses glued in. On the back I affixed the neopixels with hot glue one by one, bending the wires appropriately. To build up the thickness to accomodate the Nano I used the same size inward offset from the edge to increase the thickness. Final count of all layers is 11 layers (9 base + top, plus the vote layer/acrylic bezel and words layer).

The purpose of the code is to run the “rainbow” code indefinitely until the button is toggled, then to change the pixels to the appropriate color (blue for boy, yellow for girl). I was going to have it flash like 3 times alternating from yellow to blue and then choose, however I couldn’t get the code working the way that I want. Therefore it just locks them blue until the button it unlatched from the pressed position. BTW yes, im having a BOY!!!(soo excited!!) the code used was by no means a work of art, rather a cannibalism of a portion of the “adafruit neopixels” strandtest code with an “if”, “then”, “else” loop and a button trigger. Nothing fancy.

To make it mobile I ran it off a cheap free single cell battery pack I had lying around paired with a USB to DC jack wire salvaged from an old USB fan I scrapped a while back. This I zip-tied to a stand I had lying around and viola! The round tokens I engraved letters on for Boy or Girl, which were depressed into the cutouts simulating a “vote” once all votes were cast, button was pressed to reveal the result. Foil was added to reflect the light out, the tee part helps the center glow better.

All in all I am happy with the result, albeit I would have changed a few things in the end( better code, more of a finale, etc). Everyone was thoroughly surprised that I made this from scratch and didn’t use any examples from the internet, which of course made my day!

I would change a few things if I did it again, like making it less “bubbly” on the edges so the glue-up is easier, perhaps use a different LED without white to allow FastLED to be used instead of the Neopixel library, router the edges a bit smoother, etc.
Many of my friends have suggested that I sell these on Etsy, what do you all think of it? Never have sold any of my works, really just make things for my own sense of accomplishment and to further my abilities as a maker. what do you think, would you buy it? Pictures attached.

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Very nice! What a great idea, thanks for sharing.

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Interesting project. A second switch to set the “gender” would make this a bit more flexible.

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Very creative and well implemented.
Were did you get that screw adapter for the processor board?

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Never mind found one on Amazon

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Yea i originally sourced mine from Wish.com

True but I didn’t want any extra buttons that people might press and throw off the presentation. I was already all over it as if they pressed the button they would prematurely show the gender. I did code the colors into the code so it is as easy as changing blue to yellow once.

That is really cool, we made homemade loto tickets, then gave the doctors one for boy and one for girl, then made enough non winners for the guests… Didnt have a laser or 3d printers back then :frowning: or it would have been even cooler! :slight_smile:

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Awesome work! I wish I had that kinda talent! Unfortunately there are so many genders nowdays the best bet would be to add a third one to your project; “We’re gonna let the baby decide”!

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For that I figured just let both colors shine! lol and it was surprisingly easy after reading up on the coding part for the LEDs. Really just some minor soldering skills and desire to shoot light at wood was the gist of it. :stuck_out_tongue: