New Guide: Hallowing Flapping Bat with Spooky Eye #electronichalloween
We’ve got another great guide from Erin St. Blaine just in time for Halloween: Make a cardboard bat that flaps its wings and watches you with one spooky eye. This is a great beginner tutorial and is really fun to make with kids. If you can’t go trick-or-treating safely this year, why not stay in and get crafty with electronics?
The build is beginner-level, with no soldering required. Young makers will love decorating their bat wings and triggering the animatronic movement with capacitive touch. From the guide:
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly, Like a teatray in the sky.
The Mad Hatter
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
Make a spooky bat out of chipboard and decorate it with your best Halloween colors, sparkles, and ribbons. A little hot glue and crafting, and you’re ready to hang it above your door, where unwary passers-by will brush past and trigger your bats wings to flap up and down, scaring them out of their pants!
You don’t need a fancy motion sensor to trigger this halloween effect. The bat wings are triggered by a strand of conductive thread tied to the Hallowing’s onboard capacitive touch sensor. Anyone who comes in contact with the secret dangling thread will cause the bat to leap into motion.
The Hallowing board is the spookiest, creepiest, scariest microcontroller around. Its skull face and winking OLED eye are sure to frighten even the bravest of makers when you program it to go Bump in the Night.
Adafruit Hallowing M0 Express
Are you the kind of person who doesn’t like taking down the skeletons and spiders until after January? Well, we’ve got the development board for you. This is electronics at its most spooky! The Adafruit HalloWing is a skull-shaped ATSAMD21 board with a ton of extras built in to make for an adorable wearable, badge, development kit, or the engine for your next cosplay or prop.
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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.
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 and our Discord!
