Adding an Animated Touch to your Paper Circuit Nicho: Bringing Poetry to Life with the Chibi Scope

Hi all, Celeste here! Last year, I shared a tutorial illustrating my approach to making a light-up shadow box called a nicho. In addition to being beautiful little pieces of art, nichos can help us celebrate and remember cherished people, places, and objects. 

After I shared this tutorial, an idea popped into my mind: What if I used the Chibi Scope to animate a poem and included that in my nicho? In this blog post, I’m sharing my first attempt at bringing this idea to life!

I liked how this first experiment turned out, but I’m excited to improve it and to tinker with how the Chibi Scope fits into the Nicho. 

Here’s a little more information about the process I went through to create this example:

The Chibi Scope is designed to help you understand and debug your circuits and allows you to print information and words onto a tiny screen. It connects to the Chibi Chip and can be programmed using the online Chibitronics code editor. 

I started by connecting the Chibi Chip to the Chibi Scope using the alligator clips included in the Chibi Scope kit. 

Then, I programmed the Chibi Chip to show lines from a song I love: “Remember Me” from the movie Coco. I used the “Hello World” example program in the “Chibi Scope” examples category and changed the program to include more lines of text so that I could show a whole verse from the song on the screen. I broke the song into lines 2-3 words long because it made the poem easier to read on the Chibi Scope screen. Here’s a peek at what my program looked like:

If you’re new to coding, a great starting point is to just try changing the words inside of the quotation marks in each line beginning with “Serial.println..”. Here is the entire program that you can copy and paste into the online code editor if you’d like to try it out with your own Chibi Chip.

// Love to Code

// A simple "hello world" example using the ChibiScope

// This example sends the words "hello world!" at a very
// high speed to the ChibiScope. As a result, you will see
// some flicker on the bottom line. The cause of this is
// similar to why car wheels appear to spin backwards in movies:
// https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect

// Use the alligator clips to connect TXT, +5V and GND
// between the respective holes on the ChibiChip and ChibiScope

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600); // ChibiScope "listens" at a fixed speed of 9600 bits per second

  // the following line is needed to restore the chibiscope mode into
  // its power-on default in case you were previously running a different,
  // more complicated demo that uses the control flow verbs to set text position
  Serial.println("#RUN"); // put the scope into "run" mode, so println's immediately show up
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println(" ");
  Serial.println(" ");
  Serial.println("remember me");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("though I have");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("to say");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("goodbye");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("remember me");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("don't let it");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("make you cry");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("for even if");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("I'm far away");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("I hold you");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("in my heart");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("I sing a ");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("seceret song ");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("to you");
  delay(2000);
   Serial.println("each night");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("we are apart");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println("remember me");
  delay(2000);
  Serial.println(" ");
  Serial.println(" ");

}