A DIY Electronics-Inspired Bachelor Party (Wire) Stripper Cake #arduino #neopixels #weddings
When Tim Bartlett, Ethan Hartman, and a handful of other DIY electronics initiates found themselves faced with the challenge of hosting a bachelor party, they spent their party planning time scheming up a very memorable feature of the night.
…This is a case of knowing your audience: my friend Matt is deeply involved in the world of creative DIY electronics, and appreciates a good (ie. terrible) pun. So for Matt’s bachelor party, fellow groomsman Ethan and I arranged for a stripper to pop out of a cake — but in this case, it was a wire stripper (an electrician’s tool) animated by a jumble of electronics, in a cake which we built.
After dinner, we lit the candles on the cake (it was also Matt’s birthday), and in the dim light of the BBQ joint, the illusion was convincing.
But once Matt made his wish and blew the candles out, the top opened up revealing a stripper dancing on a stage, complete with flashing lights and music!
…Once the stage is up, the lights change to a cycling rainbow pattern. We used four of Adafruit’s 8-NeoPixel strips, all chained together in series. The first NeoPixel strip is on stage, lighting up the wire stripper.
…Music is from a chip I ripped out of a greeting card years ago, wired up to a small speaker. It plays the theme from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.”
…When you’ve had enough of the show, you can reach in through the top and press a microswitch (center of the picture, on the middle ring), which stops the dancing, turns all the lights to blue, and closes the cake up again.
We built the whole thing in very little time, and it has a cobbled-together, hot glue aesthetic. Not the finest engineering, but Matt loved it, which is all that matters.
An impressive project, very appreciated! Read More.
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