"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand"
I started with a Male Blank No Face Mask that I bought on Amazon. I used two of Adafruit’s 1.2″ blue 8×8 LED Matrices for the eyes and a set of three 1.2″ red 8×8 LED Matrices for the mouth. As in the tutorial, I hot glued the 3 mouth matrices together in a strip. The pressure of the outer mask tended to break the bonds and I ended up re-gluing one of the mouth matrices a couple of times. At first I hotglued the matrices to the mask but I found that wire worked much better….
The Adafruit LED Matrix Backpack is meant to have its LED matrix soldered right to the board, but instead I soldered on female headers that would permit me to plug in either the mini LED matrix for code testing or the large matrix for deployment. Someone will probably be along to tell me I need a resistor here or there or I’m going to blow some chip up—and they’re likely right—but it seems to have worked so far as-is.
To connect my own matrix to the I2C Backpack, I cut down a piece of prototyping board and soldered in the male headers, then connected the 8″ wires from the last row and last column of the matrix to the board.
Adafruit LED Matrix Backpacks -What’s better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! A fun way to make a small display is to use an 8×8 matrix or a 4-digit 7-segment display. Matrices like these are ‘multiplexed’ – so to control 64 LEDs you need 16 pins. That’s a lot of pins, and there are driver chips like the MAX7219 that can control a matrix for you but there’s a lot of wiring to set up and they take up a ton of space. Here at Adafruit we feel your pain! After all, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That’s where these adorable LED matrix backpacks come in.
Thanks to Brian Howland for this great video of his PumpkinHead Animatronic project that he had hoped to share during the Halloween Show & Tell!
It uses: Boarduino, Audio Shield, 16 ch servo board, RGB LED Strip and some preliminary software based on your examples.
Show & Tell is great stuff! Great to see so many folks building stuff. I am mostly by myself here in Iowa as a Maker. I will try to get on the show another time.
We look forward to having you on next time!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Halloween has been postponed in NYC but probably not for most of you reading this! Here are some highlights from our #electronichalloween series this month. Have a safe and fun night and please send us pictures of your amazing costumes and decor! Add them to the Adafruit Flickr pool, post them up on our Facebook page, or drop us a line on Twitter. And remember, through the end of the day today 10/31, get 10% off anything in our “EL Wire/Tape/Panel” category with code HALLOWEEN2012. Above is Phil Burgess aka Paint Your Dragon’s Electronic Demon costume using Adafruit gear, all finished (looking’ great!).
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Hi – my daughter made her robot halloween costume using many Adafruit parts. She did all the electronics work herself. She cut apart one of the RGB LED strips into three pieces, soldered on connecting jumper wires, soldered in an on/off switch, soldered everything to an Adafruit protoshield kit, plunked it onto one of your Arduino’s and figured out the sketch. She learned how to do most of this from your website. She is ten years old. Thank you for all of the fantastic tutorials.
These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
As we curve around the track with the Halloween finish line in sight, we wanted to share our weekly Adafruit Show and Tell, dedicated (in part) to the sharing of Halloween costume projects!
Phil and Limor showed up in a “People-about-to-be-flooded” costume — very hurricane appropriate. Not much by way of electronics, but a high concentration of electrical engineer.
Jerry Isdale from MauiMakers in Hawaii shared his costume — combination spaceman costume with TLC LEDs draped from it and a shirt made of Adafruit LED strips (10 strips at 10 LEDs each) run on a Teensy ATmega32u4 with a MaKey-MaKey running for interactive changes. He has been playing around with a bunch of code to handle the triggering he’d like (though stay tuned to see what ends up working). He also shared about his newly funded SpaceGambit project.
And while we didn’t make it to the Show and Tell, Hil and I wanted to share here the super quick EL wire project that the two of us created in Brooklyn only moments before the Adafruit Show and Tell performance. One of the difficult elements when adding LEDs, lights and electrical bits to a costume is how to protect the wiring, battery pack, etc from moisture, sweat, friction, rain, twisting, etc.
One super quick way to create a blinky-focused design safely is to grab a clean plastic take-out food container from a dollar store, mark out your design in sharpie on the inside of the enclosure, and then drill out mounting points on the bottom of the dish. Once your LEDs, EL wire, LCDs, etc, are firmly in position, throw your inverters and battery packs into the clamshell of the food container and have a nicely sealed up project, ready for a rambunctious (and, ahem, rather rainy) Halloween night-on-the-town.
Hilary drew the moon she wanted and I drilled a series of tiny pairs of holes along the path. Small pieces of wire were used to hold the EL wire in place, twisted tight on the other side of the dish. In the case of this moon, we didn’t even trim our EL-wire — we wanted the entire length for an upcoming a jack-o-lantern project. So we routed it around a couple of times and tucked the additional length inside the food container.
This solution works great for LEDs and other elements as well, those delicate solder points held safely away from the the body (for protection of both joins and skin!) — you can even fracture the plate once everything is set in place to tape it up in electrical tape as a “dead bug” to remount elsewhere!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Last night I took the as-yet-unnamed electronic demon out for a test run at the local pumpkin patch…an opportunity to try out the battery packs and work out any last gremlins. The kids were absolutely fascinated, and more than a few future engineers were hatched!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
The weekly – SHOW AND TELL is now on the Adafruit Industries Google+ page! We will be asking all the folks in the +Limor Fried (ladyada) show-and-tell circle to re-add themselves to the +Adafruit show-and-tell circle shortly. We’re moving the show-and-tell to the +Adafruit page so more of our staff can run the show-and-tells. For example, we’ll have a wearable electronics / FLORA themed one with Becky and a 3D printing themed one with Matt.
Please post a comment on the Adafruit page to be added! Make sure you add Adafruit to your circles first!
Tonight, show up in COSTUME (or share a Halloween project) and win prizes!!!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month we’ve been bringing you special “Electronic Halloween” posts here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Have you ever done something silly on a lark and then found it was a big hit? So it went with a “beta test” Halloween idea on the Adafruit Show & Tell last week of my electronic demon costume. This video is a summary of what was done there… and what I’m now scrambling to finish properly before the big day! Video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo.
Some updates since this was shot: a Ustream chat participant during Show & Tell suggested using a paintball mask as a base. I’m currently working on the faux ribcage idea… there may be enough space to move most of the electronics there and have just batteries in the pack. We shall see!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Eric over at Low Voltage Labs has posted up his design for a simple PCB ideal for putting an LED into a pumpkin. This is very much like our simple LED pumpkin project but in a neat, reusable format. And it makes a mighty cute little jack-o-lantern all on its own.
He has made it available as a kit with PCB, switch, resistor, battery holder and the same candle flicker LEDs which we love so much. Unfortunately, the kit is currently sold out. Hopefully he’ll make more, if not in time for this Halloween, then at least for next year.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Okay, so Becky has covered some great EL Wire projects earlier this month, but here some great LED costume solutions!
(Light)paint me a heretic, but you don’t necessarily need to use EL wire to create the Tron costume of your dreams. Check out this project by Sheet Metal Alchemy for Tronning-in-LED:
My goals in making this costume were to make a robust, easily washable, waterproof, Tron-style suit which was energy efficient to minimize battery weight and hardware bulk. To do that, I had to dodge the commonly used EL wire implementations and switch to LEDs.
Even if you aren’t interested in making a Tron suit, I would highly recommend reading the section on lighting implementation – I did not individually stitch each LED with conductive thread…instead I used a combination of silicone coated LED strips and faux leather to produce a beautiful, diffuse light without seeing those pesky LED points.
This is a visually stunning fancy dress costume using LED rope lights and a plastic washing basin to create a deep sea bioluminescent jellyfish thing. Perfect for Halloween, or any party where it’s going to be dark. People will stop in their tracks to start dancing round you, or simply have a spasm. You will feel like a total attention whore, but you will love it too.
Why stop at a few LEDs? Check out this LED-encrusted nightmare, a costume-within-a-costume, here:
I’ve been wanting to make an inflatable creature that would give birth to me for a while now (lots of my friend’s are having babies, so I guess my subconscious is trying to digest this). In this project, the giant evil mama bear gives birth to a slutty baby bear with LEDs, who then performs a LED hula-hoop number. After the main show I used the “power glove” to control the led lights while dancing and socializing.
Um…that’s a lot of LEDs you’ve got there, buddy.
Why stop at too many LEDs when you can go further and make an RGB LED television Video Coat!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
So … you think it isn’t enough just for you to participate in Halloween this year — you’d like to get your furry, scaly, slimy, or fishy friends into the mix? It turns out that while this can be very difficult to do, a lot of brainpower out there in the world has been devoted to precisely this challenge. (And not always that successfully.)
The good news is that the mothership is coming to pick you up. The bad news is that it is slowwww, and steaaaadddy. But uses some great Adafruit gear!
Check out this video from The Mean Kitty: a series of velcro costumes that your cat might not love to wear, but the construction has been thought through such that you have a sporting chance to affix these to your cat. But maybe it is more fun to bring Halloween to you cat than wrap your cat in Halloween?
Have you ever watched Pixar’s Up and thought, I wish my dog had a collar that would let him talk to me? Well I did, so I set out to make him one.
Because we just have this snapshot and nothing from 30 seconds later, we can’t be sure if this is the coolest, or the cruelest, headless-horseman-riding-dog costumer. For more costumes-riding-dogs, check out this post from Laughing Squid.
It can be made easily with a low cost recycled fiber optic toy, felt, and some cute little pom poms!
A sweet moment between a man and his Cerberus, stumbled upon in Flickr.
While this doesn’t technically demonstrate a costume as much as an unusual cat that loves swimming enough to be willing to be strapped into an underwater rig, I figured sorting out how to get your cat rigged up for scuba diving has to be nearly as difficult as any other Halloween pet costume challenge.
Apparently this publicity stunt from the Zoo Neunkirchen has become so popular that there are commercial crocodile-eating-your-pet costumes that you can grab. I’d love to see some Muppets-eating-your-pets costumes, btw….
But please do take care to think of your pet’s comfort, health, and safety first and foremost. Halloween is a very intense, alarming, noisy affair: you will want to take extra preparations and precautions for your charge if you are going to deck up your pet for trick-or-treating, parading, or clubbing!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Here are a few good projects to interact with the trick-or-treaters coming to your house this year. Whether it is a hard-core candy delivery system, or a way to scare those who dare walk on your front step to ring the doorbell, these should give you some good inspiration.
When trick-or-treaters show up at my house they can text, call, or tweet a code displayed on an LCD screen to get their Halloween candy. They can also push the Big Red button.
Once the candy request is made a few “special” effects are triggered by X10 modules. A low laying fog machine is activated and lights turn on while the candy shoots down from my front deck on the second floor.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
In the very near future, embedding electronics, motors, LEDs etc into clothing is going to become easier and easier thanks to Limor and Becky’s contributions to the electronic wearables movement. But people have been doing their best to add motors, lights, sparks, movement and other signs of electronic life to their Halloween costumes for years.
I spent some time at New York Comic Con, hunting around for examples of blinkies and motors etc and stumbled upon the following:
Jesse and Mary Kate build this light cube, grabbing a few off-the-shelf lights and parts — and they recommend grabbing baseball display boxes and frosting the inside of them as diffusion to create the glowing cube effect.
There was a huge crowd gathered around the sound-activated EL panel shirts vendor. This vendor brought shirts built around quite a few up-to-the-moment memes and images, ranging from weak to truly awesome. For the individual, creating one-off multicolor EL panel artwork ain’t going to be cheap or easy, but by being strategic with your graphic design you can trim and coat single-color panels to create fun designs such as the charging battery and brony light panel animations by grabbing one of our sound-activated pocket inverters.
I have written about DIY Mindwave Cat Earsprojects before, but I will say it was nice seeing lots of individuals with no exposure to these technologies before trying out these EEG-activated ears — a great place to get folks started thinking about adding tentacles, tails, barnacles and other secondary elements back into the experience of the person wearing the costume.
Given all of the great Doctor Who-themed costumes, it was great fun seeing someone took the time to get an actual light into the lantern at the top of a TARDIS costume. Lauren (I believe) went with the simple hack to get a tea-light into the top of her hat, as the other solutions wouldn’t get her all the way through the day on battery power.
For the most part, the best costumes at New York Comic Con this year were decidedly non-electronic, sadly. Check out this great gallery from Flavorwire and WIRED to see some of the more technologically advanced examples — and imagine them next year with more active, embedded electronic elements.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Add a bit of interaction to your haunted house this year with a robotic mechanical hand. Have it give out candy, grab and scare an unsuspecting trick-or-treater, or add some realism to your zombie decorations. Here are some good mechanical/robotic hand projects to give you some inspiration.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Jerome wrote in to share his amazing animatronic Stargate Horus helmet.
I’ve been working on several Halloween costumes that use Arduino powered animatronics. The video shows my Stargate helmet that uses an Arduino to control five servos that make the head move around, fans open and close and eyes that light up. There is a full build tutorial here.
I also recently have been working on a full animatronic Iron Man suit for a friend. It uses RFID tags as control inputs to open/close the helmet and activate repulsors, forearm missile, moving back flaps and opening shoulder rocket pods. The helmet is set up with a wireless link using XBee radios with Adafruit XBee adapters and the repulsor sounds are handled by a WaveShield. Arduinos are used to control the servos.
Working like mad to finish the suit by Halloween! There will be a full tutorial when it’s done.
Thanks for all of your wonderful products and tutorials. My eight year old son just soldered his very first circuit.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
One rule of thumb, if you ask those who make Cosplay a very serious undertaking, is that it isn’t the clothes that makes the costume — it’s the props. (Or is it the attitude?)
Here are a bunch of places to check out to get you inspired for your #electronichalloween projects!
Welcome to the passionate and wildly competitive granddaddy of all places on the Internet obsessed with the activity of replicating (down to scratches and handling marks) props from movies, games, and other popular entertainment: the Replica Props Forum (or, “the RPF”). While some of the goals may seem a bit niche to those visiting for the first time, the level of craft and technical no-how here is darned impressive — some replicas actually beating out the original movie prop in a face-off. A visit to the forums is always a real eye-opener in terms of ranges of techniques and problem solving that goes into getting surface treatments, built-in electronics/LEDs, and other elements to look just right.
If you have been watching some of the great design work coming out of the “MakerBot” user on Thingiverse lately, you have probably been enjoying (among others) works of elite RPF participant and now MakerBot Maker, Todd Blatt. These two pieces are less demonstrative of his replica skills from his hackerspace days, but the MakerBelt and the Shofar (above) are both worth checking out.
Check out this great Fake Geiger Counter from one of our customers: a prop that really adds a level of drama and interactivity to a costume.
Hey, since you’re putting up Halloween electronics projects, maybe my Fake Geiger Counter would fit. It uses an Arduino to create a simulated geiger counter sound effect – perfect for a mad scientist lab!
Last year, Josh Di Mauro took the inexpensive off-the-shelf EEG “brain reader” called the Neurosky Mindwave and extended it into an open-source set of wearable cat-ears that respond, somewhat accurately, to the mood of the wearer. Fans of nekomimi take note. When last I chatted with him, he was planning to go after tentacles and other appendages next.
And remember… that if you create a prop that catches fire, you can drop it: much harder to do with a costume!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Electronics can take a boring old decorated house and turn it into a real haunted house for halloween. Here is some inspiration to help get you started creating the best haunted house on the block.
Those are just some of our favorites, post up yours in the comments!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Kid robot – Helmet, chest plate, arm bracers, robot shins: Corrugated cardboard, Elmers glue, spray paint. Velcro straps from my hockey bag were used to keep some parts on.
Those are just some of our favorites, post up yours in the comments!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
At a certain point in your life, admit it, Halloween was all about the candy. And isn’t there something a little bit refreshing about admitting to yourself that this is still the case? (Depending on your age, drug store sales racks may have replaced door-to-door trick-or-treating.)
Here are a few points of inspiration for how you can combine the most important element from Halloween with your favorite DIY activity, i.e. candy+custom DIY electronics.
There have been a number of exciting dispenser projects shared over the years, but this one from Noel Portugal built around a Twilio triggering sequence has a nice demo video with what appears to be an actual child. And he used a few Adafruit items in his build. (See this link for his post for how he created this project.)
I just shared this one from the LVL1 hackerspace on Friday as a pumpkin project — but I suspect it is worth checking it out again today … in terms of the velocity of that flying candy. Dispensing candy? Or dispensing with visitors?
Or maybe you don’t want to dispense much candy, but want to learn about Capacitive Touch Sensors instead.
For this special Halloween project we built a spooky candy bowl that lights up when an unsuspecting trick-or-treater reaches in. While devices like these do exist, many of them use complicated proximity sensors to spring their trap…. Our proximity sensor is made using nothing but a NerdKit, two pieces of aluminum foil, and some paper clips!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
Carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns is perhaps the iconic activity of the Halloween. They are perfect blank canvases for makers to express electronic and interactive ideas. Here are a few pumpkin related halloween projects to give you that little bit of inspiration you need to get going.
First of all, it goes without saying that you can carve the darned things. But this is an important place to start. Some people get really into carving pumpkins and have lots to show you.
Well, you definitely need to add some candle flicker — time to incorporate the electronics! In this case using an ATTiny85 micro controller, programmed with the Arduino IDE.
While this one from the LVL1 hackerspace begs you to get a little closer. “Hello? There you are!” *pow*
The hackerspace NYC Resistor offers a yearly “Pumpkin Hacking Workshop” — check out these “hacked pumpkins” from Make: Live’s Halloween show last year, co-presented by Adafruit’s lovely Becky Stern.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each day this month (Monday-Friday) we’re going to have a special “Electronic Halloween” post here on Adafruit. It will be a hack, mod, project or something we’ve found that combines all the best things about electronics and Halloween.
My first halloween robotics/electronics project. I always wanted to do something for the halloween so I made this one. I had an old scary mask from last year and I’ve added two styrofoam balls inside to “fill it up”. I’ve mounted 2 LEDs (one for each eye), and then added a PIR sensor as well. I wanted to create something that moves as well as something that has sounds so I’ve bought a WAVE shield from Adafruit a few weeks ago.
Soldering time. I’ve started soldering the wave shield. The board is pretty slick and very well made. I also bought the Panavise Jr. This is so worth it. Soldering with a panavise is way way better than a 3rd hand tool.
Last year I wanted to put together a Halloween display emulating my favorite Disneyland/world ride of all time. Originally this was just going to be four heads on a table with the Haunted Mansion’s “Grim Grinning Ghosts” playing on a loop. But that all changed after I picked up my first Arduino UNO.
After I started learning to program my Ardunio this evolved into a photocell actuated video “on demand” Halloween display. I used an example I found on Arkadian.eu to control a Dell Mini 9 netbook running AutoHotKey. When the photocell switch is tripped the Arduino sends a serial message to the Dell laptop which is converted to a keystroke by AAC Keys which in turn triggers the below AutoHotKey Script and finally plays back using VLC. The “AAC Keys” could probably be replaced by setting up your Arduino as a USB HID but at the time this was all a foreign language to me.
When you squint a bit and loose scale these mandarin oranges look a bit like small pumpkins. I wanted to rev up the Halloween spirit around the house and without a real pumpkin to carve I settled for the next best thing. That is of course a laser etched pumpkin carving onto a mini orange which is lit from the inside using an LED.
I wasn’t sure how it would turn out since there is so much water content in an orange, I thought it might not even remove any material because of this. Thankfully I was wrong and the fruit etches quite well! I downloaded the image from this Halloween carving site. I used trial and error on the 60 watt laser machine to see what speed and power would work the best to etch the orange. Turns out that a speed of 400 and a power of 40 works great to remove the outer orange color and leave the white inner part of the peel. With a speed of 100 and a power of 95, three passes is what it took to blast away the entire peel right to the flesh of the fruit. There is a bit of inconsistent cutting since the small fruits have a very curved surface making it impossible to keep the entire etching area in focus. A rotary unit could be used to solve one axis of curvature but the results were good enough without adding any more complexity…
Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and our collection of Halloween projects continues to grow. Every fall we update it to include our latest projects for the season. We’ve categorized it by costumes, pumpkins, decor and food. If you’re inspired by one of these projects to make something, we’d love to see photos in the flickr auxiliary!
[Rick]‘s dark ride, “Scream in the Dark” was built in his 2-car garage over a few years. The kids that went though the ride were genuinely scared, but that made the kids in line even more curious – just the reaction [Rick] wanted.
Tote your Thinkpad and port your Apple in style with our custom TRON-inspired laptop bag tutorial. With a little soldering and sewing skills you can have your own light up satchel, sure to impress geeky friends. So grab your sewing needle and soldering iron and follow along. This project is a collaboration between ladyada and Becky Stern.
Assassin Eye Reticle… For my Modern Assassin Costume. Turns out my job has a laser cutter..why wasn’t I told?!?! Laser Cut EL Sheet (left over from Daft Punk Helms). Tron-tastic!
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