New Guide: Tree Ent Sculpture with Animated OLED Eyes and Motion Reactivity
Check out the latest guide from Erin St. Blaine: make an oak tree sculpture from cardboard, pipe insulation or pool noodles, and expanding foam. Bring it to life with Adafruit’s Monster M4sk and a PIR sensor, so the eyes “wake up” when someone approaches the tree.
From the guide:
Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
– Treebeard the Ent
JRR Tolkien
Your best projects are certainly worth taking a very long time to build. Luckily, the genius programmers at Adafruit have taken the time to create and build the amazing Monster M4sk — a plug-and-play TFT display “mask” that makes bringing life to your props and creatures incredibly easy.
Power it with a USB cable or battery and upload custom graphics with drag-and-drop. In just minutes, your project will wake up, blink a few times, and proceed to delight and astonish anyone who encounters it.
This tutorial goes into detail about the Monster M4sk setup process, and gives a lot of info about how I built the tree to house it. It’s not a step-by-step tree-build tutorial, but it will definitely give you the tools and a road map of how to create your own tree or monster or movie prop using expanding foam and a few simple hand tools.
See the full tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System:
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 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
