Hey friends! How was your Valentine’s Day? We sent the call out yesterday on social media for your messages of love and adoration so that we could scroll them across the gigantic crystal mirror we keep in the Pi Towers lobby. We love a good bandwagon jump, so here we are.

Making the magic happen

You’ve met this mirror before; we blogged about how our Maker in Residence, Toby, put it all together a few weeks ago. But here is a little detail on how exactly the Valentine’s messages work:

The first image you see in the video above, the one of the big pink heart, is a PNG file that we’ve transferred to the Raspberry Pi hiding behind the mirror. We could have thrown up any image, but for Valentine’s, we went traditional: pink, red, hearts, job done. A small Python script converts the image into RGB values and then displays it at the much lower resolution of our gigantic crystalline display, which has a 24 × 24 array of NeoPixel LEDs. We defined the shapes of the floating hearts with a 9 × 9 grid of ones and zeroes: the ones are lit NeoPixels filling in the shapes, and the zeroes are the unlit background. We added in a little random spawning and movement and, hey presto, got ourselves a dreamy floaty display of hearts.

Now for the hardest part. To get the words scrolling across the crystals, we used the Pillow imaging library, and the trickiest part was finding a suitable font that would be clear on such a low-res display. We were a bit sad when we found that we couldn’t include most special characters or emojis, which so many of your Valentine’s messages included. However, we could just about render an @ symbol clearly enough, so if your message included one, you’re a winner.

It’s a love story (kinda)

Without further ado, here is a collection of some of the loveliest (and, let’s be real, SFW) messages you sent us:

SORRY if your submission didn’t make the cut. As I mentioned, we couldn’t manage anything with elaborate emojis, and we also wanted to keep the video from being eight hundred days long because there is only so much love and happiness we can stomach. Now we’re off to brainstorm how to eke out some more mirror action for St Patrick’s Day.