NEW GUIDE: John Park’s Mystery Box: The Haunted Radio @adafruit @johnedgarpark
If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to build a Haunted Radio from a vintage tube radio, this is it! Take a look at the new guide, Mystery Box: The Haunted Radio, and build your own, today!!
Vintage radios are irresistible. When you hear one spewing static, your natural response is to turn the dial and try to tune in a station. The anticipation! What will you hear? With this Haunted Radio project, you can decide for your guests or escape room attendees exactly what they’ll hear, and you can even choose the frequency.
There isn’t a pirate radio station involved here, either. Instead, the secret is a Feather microcontroller reading the dial position with a magnet sensor, and an attached Music Maker FeatherWing with amplifier to play back your pre-recorded message over the radio’s speaker.
You’ll use a Feather ESP8266 HUZZAH microcontroller, Music Maker FeatherWing, and a Hall effect sensor to detect a special position on the tuning dial, and then play a special sound effect or other recording when your guest has dialed in the magic number.
You’ll even reuse the existing speaker and on/off switch from your old radio!
Play a special song when the dial’s magnet trips the Hall effect sensor.
Plus, the Feather ESP8266 HUZZAH has WiFi built in, so you can code all kinds of extra tricks to interact with the Internet of (Spooky) Things.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
