Schlagwort: halloween decoration

  • Brew virtual potions by mixing ingredients in this interactive cauldron

    Brew virtual potions by mixing ingredients in this interactive cauldron

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The large, bubbling cauldron is a classic mainstay in our Halloween decorations as it evokes imagery of devious witches and their mysterious concoctions. Fed up with this being a mere display piece, element14 Presents’ Katie Dumont created an enchanted cauldron that allows visitors to brew their own digital potions from an array of distinct ingredients using a whimsical “wand” and NFC-tagged bottles.

    To test her idea of mixing ingredients, Dumont began by connecting an Adafruit NFC reader to an Arduino UNO Rev3 along with a strip of RGB LEDs. The code she wrote checks which NFC tag is present every second, and depending on the color, will either add another color or increase/decrease the overall brightness. After the special wand tag has been detected, each pixel along the strip is mixed into a shared, uniform color across all of them.

    Upon the heels of this successful experiment, Dumont included another layer of interactivity in the form of a small game where players are presented with a certain color and must try to use the potion bottles to replicate it as close as possible with only red, green, and blue inputs. After selecting a sequence of three colors, tapping the wand will display the result and either flash red or white to indicate failure or success, respectively.

    To see more about how Dumont designed her cauldron, you can read the build log here and watch her demo video below!

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVR5gGOTfvs?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    The post Brew virtual potions by mixing ingredients in this interactive cauldron appeared first on Arduino Blog.

    Website: LINK

  • Stranger Things Christmas lights are the perfect Halloween decoration

    Stranger Things Christmas lights are the perfect Halloween decoration

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    In the first season of Stranger Things, a character uses a string of Christmas lights to communicate with a missing loved one. The missing person in question can flash particular lights next to letters painted on a bedsheet to spell out messages. The Christmas lights and bedsheets have become a part of pop culture and because the show is creepy, Redditor BishSaidWut’s recreation is the perfect Halloween decoration.

    Unlike most of the similar decorations that you can buy online that either blink randomly or spell out pre-programmed messages, BishSaidWut’s Christmas lights can spell out any message that they text to a specific phone number. That phone number connects to the Twilio service, which parses SMS messages and makes the text available through an API. An ESP8266 board connects to that API and processes incoming messages. If the message is within an acceptable length and doesn’t contain profanity, the ESP8266 passes on the text to an Arduino Uno board. 

    The Arduino controls the actual Christmas lights. It buffers text strings that it receives from the ESP8266 and begins animating a new message as soon as the last one finishes. The Christmas lights are all individually addressable RGB LEDs, so the Arduino simply illuminates the LED next to each letter in the proper sequence. BishSaidWut set this up for SMS control so that they could display new messages whenever they like and they’re even considering posting the phone number so others can send their own messages while BishSaidWut streams the results. 

    Boards:Uno
    Categories:Arduino

    Website: LINK