Featured Adafruit Community Project

Noé and Pedro Ruiz, the creative force behind Pixil 3D, have been making incredible 3DP projects that incorporate Adafruit products for a number of months — but with with their keytar project “Slixtar MIDI Controller” — a FLORA project to-boot! — we invited them to share a detailed tutorial for how to create one of these with the rest of our community. Check out their Thingiverse page to see a number of other open source projects that you can download the Slixtar as well as other awesome 3DP + electronics projects. (read more)

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 64,784 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Matt Heilman shared: “Pumpkin Solar Light Hack” Really great idea! (read more)

Robert Wozniak shared: “Just in time for Halloween, I designed these Flexible 3D printed TPE Urethane black widow spiders. They are 10 cm across. There are 2 x 5mm holes for LEDs to fit in from the bottom, which gives the red hourglass an eerie glow. I wired 2 red LED is series, and connected them directly to an 18650 LiPo battery. For most red LEDs this gives just the right voltage drop. I uploaded it to Thingiverse here if you want to give it a try.” (read more)

Matthew Hillis shared: “Introducing the ‘Catching Fire’ dress. This is a design by Emma, electronics by me and Dress made by Sweetie. Emma also helped solder and sew the electronics on the dress. Why not do a Daddy Daughter sewing project for Halloween? The electronics are a Flora, 1m of NeoPixels and a Accelerometer. The code was inspired by the Sparkle Skirt and other code I found browsing the +Adafruit Industries forums. We are still playing with some of the light animations but having the accelerometer sensor gives us some fun ways to trigger different animations. #electronichalloween” (read more)

Swaroop Bekal shared: “Used a webcam with Raspberry Pi to film Squirrels using Motion ! Details of hardware setup and software used are at the end.” (read more)

Rick Wagner shared: “First draft complete! Just needs a kid to wake up and try it on. The original plan was to print out the Minecraft griefer skin to give the costume the canonical pixelated look, but reality set in. 3M spray adhesive and craft paper was much faster. The arms and torso are actually two different papers, but the colors match much more closely than I’d hoped. The costume’s first trial by fire is tonight at a party. Over the weekend we’ll perform any necessary repairs and add more of the details, like the headphones and rucksack. And since we now have a rainbow of colors due to my desperate purchases, we’ll add some pixels. There may even be a Minecraft wolf costume in process for a stuffed animal.” (read more)

Gabe Escobar shared: “Working on a fun Halloween project for my haunted doorway for the front door. This is basically step one. The small circuit board has 4 different prerecorded scary sounds on it. It had a small speaker connected to it. I disconnected the small speaker and wired the output to a 1/8” stereo jack. I took an old set of attached speakers cut one speaker off the pair and put a plug on it to connect to the scary sound maker. I put a motion sensor on the lid that is going to be wired to my arduino which will be step 2. When kids walk under the sensor to go to the front door it’s going to make a scary noise sound come over the speaker and make the ultra bright red LEDs that I’m going to put into the skulls eyes start flashing. I may need to put a camera out there just so I can see their reactions, muahahaha (evil laugh)” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

Alice (herself a professor with some pretty impressive Computer Science credentials) made this amazing, from-scratch Ada Lovelace costume, and wrote-up the details on her blog. (read more)

Rich_O shared an Arduino robotics project he has been working on for a while on the Adafruit Forums — and has shared code he tuned for autonomous roving! “I wanted to share the learning project I have been working on to program the Arduino and control a robot. I purchased the J-Bot rover chassis (4 wheel / 4 motor DFROBOT ROB003), the (((Ping ultrasonic range finder, Standard RC servo (HS-311), Arduino Uno and the Adafruit V2 motor controller. I initially attempted this project with the Leonardo but It was to difficult for me to use the USB interface with the Leo’s virtual USB port. I used the 5 AA battery holder (fitted inside the rover between the motors) and batteries to power the motors and a 6 AA batteries to power the Arduino Uno and servo. My next step is to add remote control via integration with my onboard Raspi via WiFi and the MobaXterm remote terminal.” (read more)

Maker builds Disneyland -as- Halloween costume!. Great work Rob! “Here it is! The completed Disneyland Costume! Sleeping Beauty’s castle is on my head. I’ve got Walt Disney and Mickey right in front of my mouth, and a great look down Main Street USA. Behind my head are the teacups, King Arthur’s Carousel, Dumbo, the Storybook Boats, Small World and Toon Town.” (read more)

Build report of 3DP Testbench, Including Adafruit TFT & Printer, shared in the Adafruit Forums! “The test bench uses the stepper motor to turn a “throttle shaft” approx 90°, stopping every 0.75° to take an ADC measurement of the Throttle Position Sensor being tested. Usually, 120 or more values are measured and then put in an array and analyzed for standard deviation and also some strict bounding to make sure the plot doesn’t wave around too much. The bench decides if it’s good or bad. If it’s good, the response plot is printed out on the Thermal Printer with a summary of the analysis….” (read more)

gregington took our Sparkle Skirt to the next level by adding a microphone so the skirt can react to sound! (read more)

Mario wrote in to share his newest project, the Arduino controlled smart coaster: “The Smart Coaster is an intelligent coaster for your beverages. It recognizes the different types of beverages placed on top of it, with a cocktail the Smart Coaster glows in some atmospheric and slowly changing colors. If you place a cup of hot tea on it, it automatically starts a special tea timer program which shows you, when the tea is ready to drink. If the glass is empty or filled with a cold drink the Smart Coaster glows blue, if the drink within the glass is hot, it glows red.” (read more)

Andreas Bastian shared #maketheworld prosthetics materials experimentation: using heat for Molding/Deforming PLA Meshes for Robohands! “I shared some of my recent experiments with moldable PLA gauntlets this afternoon with Jon, Jorge, and Vinnie during the hangout and wanted to share them here too. I’ve been refining my mesh to be stronger and more functional by thickening the component webs and adding features to interface with existing robohand hinges. This album covers two sequential prototypes. The files for the latest mesh gauntlet and some tips for printing/scaling them can be found in the e-NABLE community….” (read more)

Michael Nilsson and Marcus Olsson of slickstreamer have built a music visualizer into a table with LED lights that flash to the beat of the music. “This hack start as a idea to connecting Spotify to philips hue and make them flash in sync to the music. But during the path off the project it become more about led lights =)” (read more)

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