I began to assemble the first prototype! My goal was to place 3 pogo pins on the farthest corners of the perf board to make it easier to line up the pieces of the heart with the pins. As you can see, I soldered the pogo pins through the board, with the other side connecting to the appropriate Arduino pins. I modeled and 3D printed every piece in this project. I am a very hands-on person, so being able to quickly print out a test part is incredibly useful!

I spent a lot of time in Inventor modeling the heart base and making sure my measurements of the perf board were correct. Hopefully since I triple checked everything, the pins should line up with the pieces! Since this is a preliminary test, I decided to keep it simple and make the base relatively flat and quick to 3D print. In the final versions, the heart will look more like the 3D heart on the home page of this project.

I secured the perf board and the pins in place with hot glue. I had issues with the copper traces breaking off of the other side of the perf board (cheap perf board ugh).

Here you can see the base holding the perf board in place:

Here is the underside of the heart base. There's 8 cavities carved into the bottom. These cavities are meant to hold magnets. There will be 2 magnets for each section, which will help guide/align the corresponding heart piece. The magnets also serve to provide enough force to activate the pogo pins when the heart piece is placed down.

There are also 4 slots extruded through the base to allow the pogo pins to be connected through the bottom. I slightly misaligned these slots, so my next iteration will fix that issue.