eagleeye2e shared a how-to for bringing some Adafruit interactive bling to his son’s Pinewood Derby car on the Adafruit Forums:

We decided to add a little high-tech flash to my son’s Pinewood Derby car this year. This project involved several Adafruit products including a 3.3v Trinket, a NeoPixel stick, a FLORA Accelerometer/Compass Sensor, and a Lithium Ion Polymer Battery. All of these components were chosen for their size and their light weight. The idea was to have a subtle yellow glowing effect under the car while it was at rest and while the car was in motion going down the track the pixels scroll from front to back with a brighter, different, color. The faster the car goes, the faster the pixels scroll. In addition, every time the car goes from scroll to rest, the color of the scrolling pixels changes to a new color for the next race. The car received many complements and oooh’s and ahhh’s. Thank you Adafruit for all of the great products that allowed us to add something fun and unique to our Pinewood Derby experience!

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Featured Adafruit Product!

Adafruit Trinket – Mini Microcontroller – 3.3V Logic: Trinket may be small, but do not be fooled by its size! It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATtiny85, a little chip with a lot of power. We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your expensive dev-board and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost arduino-IDE programmable board! (read more)