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.
For those who have been following Phil Burgess’s “Electronic Demon Project” costume, here is a pretty final version — now with EL-wire traced wings!
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.
View all our Electronic Halloween posts here! From now until 10/31/2012 use the code HALLOWEEN2012 on check out to get 10% off anything in our “EL Wire/Tape/Panel” category.
