Electronic Jack-o-Lanterns and Candy Bowls! #ElectronicHalloween


Preview lightbox adafruit halloween2016 blog 1

Sensors JackOTheremin

The Adafruit Learn System has some of the best halloween content out there! Here are just a couple of our favorite to get your #Electronichalloween off to a great start!

Jack-o-Theremin Make spooky, pumpkiny sounds this Halloween! A theremin is an electronic musical instrument that you can play without even touching it – spooky! The theremin senses the distance from its antennae to the player’s hands, and changes its pitch and volume based on these distances. The theremin was used to make soundtrack music for many iconic spooky movies, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1958), and is perfect inspiration for a Halloween project!
Here, I’ve turned a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Theremin using an ultrasonic distance sensor and a Circuit Playground Express (CPX). The CPX uses the distance measurement to generate a sound and flash the onboard NeoPixels in various colors. This version of a theremin has a much more digital-bleepy-bloopy sound than a traditional theremin, but you still get to make music by waving your hand around in the air! Learn more!


Track your treats hero
Track Your Treats: Halloween Candy GPS Tracker Track your trick or treat candy route to log which houses had the best candy! So you’ve got an awesome Halloween costume planned, but do you know the best places to go trick or treating this year? Some houses have great candy while others might stick you with a set of wax teeth or a granola bar–yuck! Wouldn’t it be nice to keep a record of the best houses for trick or treating? With this Track Your Treats GPS Candy Tracker project you can build a candy container that logs exactly where you found the best Halloween candy. Using the power of the global positioning system you can optimize your trick or treat route for maximum candy acquisition! Learn more!


Projects candytop
Halloween Pumpkin :
Here is a quick project for an electronic halloween pumpkin. With a bit of hacking a $1 plastic pumpkin is upgraded: a sensor embedded in the nose detects when people get close and will play scarey sounds and animates LEDs on the face. The sounds are stored on an SD card so it’s easy to change and customize what the pumpkin says, while the code is written for an Arduino so it’s easy to modify the behavior. I’m going to have this pumpkin outside my door to freak out the little kids who go to daycare nearby. Boo! Learn more!


Adafruit electronic halloween dark 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 in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, Discord, Instagram 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, 3D hangouts with Noe and Pedro, Show and Tell and Ask an Engineer, featuring store discount codes, ideas for projects, costumes, decorations, and more!


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