My Wife puts up with all of my fussing and tinkering, so this year I decided to put some of it to good use. To show her how much I care and hey, I can do tinkering for her too. 

I started with an idea of just cutting a piece of wood in the shape of a heart. I thought of some paint and stuff, with the 8x8 matrix in the middle. Once I started playing around and prototyping it I just wasn't quite feeling it. 

So I put that aside and started on the hardware and software. What is easy on the Uno takes a little puttering to get it to work on the ATTiny. I wasn't deterred. I really like the little chip and have used it in projects past. It took about an evening to get the display, animations, and message prototyped up on a breadboard. 

This is kind of the part where things all came together. My mind started with how to design a PCB for it and how to hang it. Huh, 4 pins and no resistors or caps? Why bother with the PCB. I took to paper and pencil and started to layout how best to arrange the ATTiny to the matrix. This is the first time I tried this style of soldering. I have checked out plenty of examples of it before and fascinated by it. While this is a simple (really simple example) I can see both the utility and art in this fashion of building. 

The code is pretty simple, but I have put it up on my GitHub if anyone is interested. Thanks for taking a minute to check out my project. I hope I inspire someone else to give it a try.