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.
The year is 1992, and Marc Evan and Chris Soria are sitting next to each other in sixth-grade Spanish class. They don’t know it yet, but these two twelve year olds are going to become best friends. They’re going to construct epic haunted houses each year, petrifying parents more than peers. They’re going to attend an artsy high school, study illustration at Parsons, grow up, and move to Brooklyn. They’re going to freelance and bartend and, per their favorite holiday, casually carve some pumpkins for bosses and friends. And then the Yankees are going to put in a double-digit order, and Maniac Pumpkin Carvers will be born.
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.
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.
The main difference with my new design is how the EL wire is controlled. Before, I had the entire box controlled with an analog circuit. I like to make things analog whenever possible, and given how simple a graphic equalizer is, it wasn’t much of a challenge. This presented a problem this time around though.
The new glasses will be set up on a display for a silent auction, and keeping in line with the “silent” aspect, there won’t be any loud music to show them off. This makes them a lot less desirable as a simple description card really can’t convey how cool they are.
This meant that I had to incorporate some kind of “demo” mode which eventually turned into making a full-on digital sequencer that can either react to music or play back pre-recorded patterns.
Here is my version of this project, using the 0.8″ LED matrix/backpacks. I really enjoyed putting it together – thanks for the idea and tutorials (oh – and the source code!). The skull is a temporarily re-purposed candle holder. An Ardweeny powers the sketch (my Adafruit ARDX would not fit into the Brainial Cavity).
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