Not only chocolate and clocks come from Switzerland as was demonstrated by this project that we received some time ago. A large box was brought into our labs in which we found a USB stick, a power adapter and a nicely constructed contraption consisting of a circuit board with many LEDs looking suspiciously like a scrolling LED marquee. The only document accompanying it was a business card with an email address. After powering on the device we discovered that the marquee displayed a letter to Elektor.



This is what it said:

Ideal observing distance 3 m, in full darkness.
Hello Elektor! Thank you for everything you have taught me about electronics!
This project is open source and may be published and improved. 180 LEDs controlled by a single PIC 18F46K22 clocked at 64 MHz, the program is written in C.
A gift for you!
Best regards,
Joël Huser,
Switzerland

How could we not love it? If you too want to send us a nice message in an original form, please do. We love to be surprised.

Here are the project files that we found on the USB stick.