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Halloween Circuitry Projects

By Anonymous


In the YA & Children's department, we are gearing up for Halloween using Arduino and littleBits. How cool would it be to do homemade Halloween interactive props? Every year we say that we want to do a Haunted House and this is our first step in the right direction.

littleBits just released some Halloween inspired projects: creepy picture frames, pumpkins, & EL wire wearables using the Deluxe kits. We will be using these as a baseline for ideas in our Tinkering Thursday Halloween projects on October 16th. My hope is that they could be put on display until Halloween (if they aren't too scary).

As an advanced project for the middle school DIY Club, we are going to be using the Sparkfun Arduino Inventors Kit to go through the manual for 2 weeks practicing breadboard circuitry and preset Arduino programming. They have a great easy to understand manual with detailed pictures for beginners. From there, we have researched Halloween based projects for further exploration to include a talking skeleton and LED pumpkin. Here is our additional experimental materials (- a pumpkin and a skeleton).

2 - $5.90 - PRT-09518 - 9V to Barrel Jack Adapter  ($2.95 ea.)
4 - $2.00 - PRT-09280 - Arduino Stackable Header - 6 Pin  ($0.50 ea.)
4 - $2.00 - PRT-09279 - Arduino Stackable Header - 8 Pin  ($0.50 ea.)
2 - $79.90 - DEV-10628 - MP3 Player Shield  ($39.95 ea.)
2 - $1.90 - COM-10722 - Thin Speaker  ($0.95 ea.)
2 - $3.90 - COM-09151 - Speaker - 0.5W (8 ohm)  ($1.95 ea.)
2 - $57.90 - COM-10747 - PowerSwitch Tail II  ($28.95 ea.)
10 - $17.60 - ROB-11696 - Hobby Motor - Gear  ($1.76 ea.)
2 - $19.90 - SEN-08630 - PIR Motion Sensor  ($9.95 ea.)
2 - $5.90 - PRT-10512 - 9V Battery Holder  ($2.95 ea.)

A few things to keep in mind:
How is the Arduino powered? We thought we'd try 9v batteries and a powerswitch tail.
WAV or MP3 sound shield? Either shield works, depending on the Arduino board you have, but most of the popular music is mp3 format.  You also need a memory card: SD or mini SD depending on the shield.
All motion sensors are not equal. PIR motion sensor or range? We still don't know!

Happy Halloween Makers. Wish us luck. Pictures to follow!
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