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.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
