Remembering Satoshi Kon
September 1, 2025
Holiday Card Shenanigans
For the past decade or so, I’ve been making wacky holiday cards each year to share with family and friends, and I try to push the envelope a bit each time to learn and incorporate some new (to me) techniques and skills. Until last year before I retired, it was one of the few completely personal creative projects I got to do on a regular basis. For the first few years the cards usually featured traditional illustrations, but in 2020 I bought a Cricut Maker digital cutting machine, and that blew open a whole new world of possibilities for me – not only for enabling me to do intricately cut 2D designs, but 3D cards as well.
Left: Some of the components that made up my 2022 pop-up card design; Right: identifying the solder contacts to hack lighting into my current project.
For this year’s card, I wanted to have it play a tune when the card is opened. So I worked with a manufacturer on Alibaba to customize an audio module to play a prerecorded song. I specifically wanted it to play the music clip just once though, unless the card is closed and opened again, so doesn’t just go on forever, and they were able to accommodate my request.
About a month after I recieved my audio modules, I realized it would also be cool if the cards could power up an LED light when the music starts. Obviously I couldn’t return the modules since they were customized per my request, so I posed it as a question to my ChatGPT agent – “is this even possible to do?” It turns out it was, if I could identify which contacts on the PCB would let me to power the light on when the music is activated, and then turn off when the circut is open (disconnected) again. I uploaded a picture of the board, and my GPT helped me identify some candidate pads to test with a multimeter while playing and not playing the music to see which ones might work. Within minutes we had it figured out.
Today I broke out my trusty soldering iron and attached a small 3v LED to the contacts on the PCB that my GPT helped me identify. Lo and behold it worked! At the risk of ruining this phrase for everyone, this year’s card is gonna be lit! Sorry I couldnt resist the pun. I’ll share the final project later!