Happy Birthday Don!!!

how to bake(make) a fake cake

For my dad's 55th birthday, I decided to make him a cake. I'm not much of a chef, but I'm a gigantic geeky engineer, so I headed on down to edgerton machine shop. After rooting around in scrap bins, I put some sheet metal through rollers, cut some joining plates, and found a rubbery circle that would serve as the top.
Then I headed over to miters to build the electronics. The cake counts to 55 in binary using 6 blue LEDs. Atmel inside, of course. An aTTiny26 is driving the LEDs off of one of its registers. Stick in a 7805 and a 9V battery and we're done. To finish it off, I 'iced' the cake using weatherstrip adhesive and spackle and made candles out of springs with LEDs at the top. I went over the steel sides with a piece of sandpaper to give it a scratchy reflective finish.

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