Electronic earrings present a lot of mechanical challenges due to their size. I like making interesting jewelry and also love building small-tiny-miniscule electronics, so I took on the challenge!

I feel the main difficulty in making electronic stud earrings is passing electrical signals though a single ear-hole. If the battery is placed behind the earlobe, there's really only room for one cable to run to a circuit on the front (unless you have your 2nds). One of the only consumer light-up earrings solves this by using a tiny co-ax cable and a somewhat clever coin battery pack. I yoinked this precision-manufactured cable and battery pack to power my own earring designs.

To the left is a video of one of my first designs, a simple 4-led blinker powered by an DIP ATtiny85! The SMD LEDs and current limiting resistors are all soldered onto a tiny piece of perfboard which is connected to the chip and the earring post.

My first earring here was a little bulky for my liking, most of the size is from using the fairly large DIP-8 package of the ATtiny. In the future, I'll be switching this out for smaller SMD packages or even the tiny tiny QFN package (as seen above) if I make a custom PCB for the earring. All ICs pictured above are ATtinys of various sizes and processors.