Check out the latest tutorial from Erin St Blaine: build a Halloween illusion that transforms your face into the face of a skeleton or monster. This prop can also be used to blend your face with your friend’s face. It uses a Feather ESP32 board and NeoPixel LEDs with a 2-way mirror to create all the spookiness.
From the guide:
Get spooky this year with a magical halloween coffin that holds a surprise inside. A 2-way mirror and an array of animated lights creates a face-blending illusion, melting your face into a creepy skeleton or other Halloween monster. You can also prop this up and blend two human faces together, creating a very creepy and surreal experience.
This project requires a little soldering and some software installation, but no coding. We’re using an ESP32 Feather board to program and control our lights over WiFi, so you can control and change the colors or animations with your smart phone or any web-enabled browser.
This illusion was inspired by TANZER’s Infinity Boxes, and first created by us for Maker Faire 2024, where we built it inside a Love Tree. It turned out so good that we wanted to recreate it to scare the kids in our neighborhood on Halloween!
Content Summary:
– The guide provides instructions on creating a Halloween prop that uses an illusion to transform the viewer’s face into a skeleton when they peek inside a coffin.
– It includes details on setting up lighting effects that enhance the illusion, making for a spooky and memorable Halloween experience.
Adafruit Products Used:
– The project utilizes the Adafruit NeoPixel LED strips for customizable and vibrant lighting effects. (https://www.adafruit.com/category/168)
– An Adafruit microcontroller is used to control the NeoPixel LEDs and coordinate the lighting to create the desired illusion effect. (https://www.adafruit.com/category/17)
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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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