A couple of years ago, John picked up two plastic skull decorations in the post-Halloween sales. It occurred to him that they could become an interesting project.

Adding some lights to their eyes with some fun effects was the plan. The modified basic plastic skull was upgraded with LED eyes.

The parts, in addition to the skull, are as follows:

• An Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express (a tiny single board computer)
• Two Adafruit NeoPixel Jewels for the eyes
• Patch wires
• A 400 pin solderless breadboard

The Adafruit ItsyBitsy board comes pre-installed with CircuitPython, which makes it very simple to code up the effects we needed for this relatively simple project. We only need a single output pin from the board to drive the data line for the LEDs. They connect to each other to form a chain of 14 pixels. Each pixel has 16 million colors to choose from, expressed in standard RGB values.

See the full project in the post here.