Thanks to Mark for sending in this fun Halloween project – check out the full build here!
Muhahahaha! Aaaaargh! Trick or Treat. Be so sweet. Give me something good to eat.
I wanted to build something cool and scary for Halloween. Here in Germany Helloween is just about to become a trend. Meet the ScareOS, a thingy to spice up Halloween.
Features
- Moving eyes (object tracking perhaps in version 2 – have to figure out how to integrate motion tracking)
- Discovers if someone is around by using a ranging sensor
- Plays Halloween sounds when it’s awake
- Sleep state if no one is around for a while
- Whines when someone comes too close
ScareOS is an Arduino-based thingy with eyes, sound and a range sensor. ScareOS tends to be sleepy. It there’s no one around, it sleeps and snores. As soon as someone comes into range, it awakens. Then the thingy looks at its visitor, triggers a series of Halloween sounds and, moves its eyes. But beware! It starts to cry like a baby when you approach too close.
The components are not yet built into a Pumpkin, but they are ready to go. I’ll provide pictures on Oct 31, once I got the pumpkin set up.
Featured Adafruit Products!
Adafruit Small 1.2″ 8×8 LED Matrix w/I2C Backpack – Yellow: What’s better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! A fun way to make a small display is to use an 8×8 matrix or a 4-digit 7-segment display. Matrices like these are ‘multiplexed’ – so to control 64 LEDs you need 16 pins. That’s a lot of pins, and there are driver chips like the MAX7219 that can control a matrix for you but there’s a lot of wiring to set up and they take up a ton of space. Here at Adafruit we feel your pain! After all, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That’s where these lovely LED matrix backpacks come in. We have them in three flavors – a mini 0.7″ 8×8, a small 1.2″ 8×8 and a 4-digit 0.56″ 7-segment. They work perfectly with the matrices we stock in the Adafruit shop and make adding a bright little display trivial. Read more.
Adafruit Audio FX Sound Board – WAV/OGG Trigger with 2MB Flash: Would you like to add audio/sound effects to your next project, without an Arduino+Shield? Or maybe you don’t even know how to use microcontrollers, you just want to make a sound play whenever you press a button. What about something that has to be small and portable? You are probably feeling a little frustrated: it’s been very hard to find a simple, low cost audio effects trigger that is easy to use and does not require any programming UNTIL NOW! Read more.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Every day this month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us on Google+, in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, or Twitter— we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). You can also send us a blog tip! Tune in to our live shows, Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern, 3D hangouts with Noe and Pedro, and Ask an Engineer, featuring store discount codes, ideas for projects, costumes, decorations, and more!
