Check out the latest tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System from Erin St. Blaine: Make a light up Crystal-topped Wizard staff to go with your favorite cosplay outfit.
This staff is built around a Circuit Playground Express, and has different LED animations that trigger when you tilt or shake it. The tutorial explains how to customize the animations to suit your character. From the guide:
Complete your Cosplay with a gorgeous glowing crystal-topped magical Wizard staff. Use the Circuit Playground Express’ onboard sensors to program magic spells into your staff and control the lighting effects with your gestures: shake, spin, tilt, or swing the staff to trigger your custom light animations.
A Wizard staff should be as unique as the Wizard who wields it. The more care and thought you put into the creation of your magic staff, the more it will bring your character to life. We’ve included sample code in Microsoft MakeCode so you can customize your staff’s animations to suit your character.
This project requires some fairly easy soldering and a good bit of creative crafting. I didn’t use any fancy tools like 3d printers or lasers or even regular power tools for this project, though I did use a laminating machine for the crystal gem. For the rest, I kept it fairly simple with pre-cut plastic tubes and oven-bake polymer clay.
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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.
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