- The costume wasn’t carefully planned, it was improvised and upgraded in steps. Electronics doesn’t need to be a daunting, formal thing — don’t be afraid to experiment and play when developing your own Halloween or cosplay ideas. I still pull it out and add new things occasionally.
- The software we wrote is all open source…you can take it apart, remix it, use a little or a lot, improve or adapt it to your own projects (which we hope you’ll share!)
Relevant Tutorials
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Animating Multiple LED Backpacks (and the prerequisite Adafruit LED Backpacks guide). This illustrates the wiring for the LED matrices that make up the face. The idea of combining this with a Wave Shield (for playing back prerecorded sounds) is touched on here.
- Wave Shield Voice Changer (and the prerequisite Wave Shield guide). This shows how to combine the Wave Shield with a microphone to alter one’s voice. There are two example programs for this tutorial: “adavoice” is the voice changer alone, while “adavoice_face” also adds the LED backpack face animation…the latter code is what the demon is using.
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Working with EL Wire
- EL Wire Animal Masks (similar construction techniques were used for Spark’s wings and horns)
- Firewalker LED Sneakers
If vision and safety are a concern, or if you’re just not keen on spandex, you could build atop a bike helmet with a robot or alien face that sits above your own head. The EL Wire Animal Masks tutorial shows some great examples of this style!
The breathing effect was achieved using a PWM output on the Arduino (the analogWrite() function), connected to a power MOSFET to drive all the LEDs. It’s similar to the code and wiring used in this RGB LED Strip guide, but using discrete LEDs in parallel instead.