Planet Arduino

Take thirty seconds out of your day and try to make fun of the last name of the person who wrote this post. Go ahead, it’s okay. You probably won’t need more than ten seconds to come up with something that uses the same first, middle, and last letter. While nothing can be done to prevent last name-based harassment in the schoolyard, first names are another matter. [Ranthalion] recently dined with friends who are expecting twins and have yet to decide on names for them. It’s difficult enough to name one child, and we can imagine ourselves spending an entire day or two getting funny name pairs for twins out of our systems (Flora and Fauna, Scylla and Charybdis, &c). With the baby shower two weeks away, [Ranthalion] had to act fast in creating his Baby Namer.

It needed to be something he could make relatively cheaply with parts on hand. Although he made a prototype with an Arduino, he wasn’t about to just give one away. [Ranthalion]’s Baby Namer uses two arrays, one with awesome names like, well, Sharktooth Chompenstein, and one with regular names from census data such as Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice. Things got a bit hairy with the volume of names he got from census data and he learned the value of PROGMEM for storing things.

On startup, it displays four names from the Awesome pile as a gag and then pulls from the Ho-Hum group. However, each time it pulls a regular name, there’s a 25% chance that part of an Awesome name will be included. Get thee to the gits and have a laugh at other names on the Awesome list.