Category: Electronics

Talking Dog Collar with Bluetooth Control

Make a bluetooth-activated talking dog collar for Halloween or just to show off at the park! This intermediate electronics project was inspired by Dug from the movie Up– his talking collar translates his thoughts for communicating with humans. Using the Audio FX board and Bluefruit Micro, this project enables you to trigger sound samples through the Bluefruit LE Connect app for iOS and Android. The sounds are played through a mono amp connected to a mini metal speaker.

The collar itself is made from a leather belt, with 3D printed “greebles” to make it look like the collar from the movie.

It’s easy to adapt this circuit for any phone-triggered audio project by swapping out the sound samples!

Before you begin, familiarize yourself with the following prerequisite guides:

For this project you will need:

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Mystical LED Halloween Hood

Create glowing eyes for your costume! This project is ideal for any character with glowing eyes, like the Black Mage from Final Fantasy, Jawa from Star Wars, or Orko from He-Man. Two NeoPixel Jewels can appear any color or animating pattern, and they are driven by a GEMMA microcontroller powered by a 500mAh lipoly battery in a 3D printed pocket.

Before you begin, check out these prerequisite guides:

For this project, you will need:

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How To Sew NeoPixels with Conductive Thread

What’s a wearable project without LEDs? Designed specifically for wearables, bright RGB LEDs are paired with a constant-current driver chip. The contacts are easily sewn with conductive thread. Use this guide to test your first pixel and start on a blinding wearables project with Circuit Playground Express, FLORA or GEMMA!

Each pixel draws as much as 60mA (all three RGB LEDs on for full brightness white). In theory, FLORA can drive up to 500 pixels at 30 FPS (above which it will run out of RAM). Circuit Playground Express can drive more than that.  However, above about 20 pixels (and/or if the overall length of conductive thread exceeds ~6 feet/2 meters), the nontrivial resistance of the thread adds up and can affect the power supply. For large quantities of pixels over 20 or if you need to insulate your circuit, you should upgrade to silicone coated stranded core wire, which will provide better conductivity for the pixels – the current draw will add up fast!

Before you begin, familiarize yourself with the following tutorials:

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Unicorn Horn with 3D Printing & NeoPixel LEDs

Searching for a simple costume project to bring your Unikitty or Lady Rainicorn to the next level? 3D print a flexible unicorn horn and illuminate it from within with NeoPixels and a GEMMA M0, GEMMA v1 or GEMMA v2 based microcontroller. Or forget the electronics and use glow in the dark NinjaFlex filament for a green glow with no batteries required.

This is a pretty quick soldering project that is suitable for attentive beginners! Prerequisite guides:

For this project you will need:

Unicorn glamour shots by Andrew Tingle.

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EEG Costume Cap

Make this ambitious costume project for Halloween or cosplay event! Before you begin this ambitious and time-consuming project, complete the following prerequisite guides:

To make this project, you will need:

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Buzzing Mindfulness Bracelet with GEMMA

Build yourself a buzzing bracelet for subtle haptic feedback as time passes! It’s great for reminding yourself to get up and walk away from your desk for a few minutes each hour, or just as a way to have a new awareness of how the perception of passing time varies based on what you’re doing.

You’ll whip up a vibrating motor circuit using a transistor, resistor, and diode, and use GEMMA to control the frequency of vibration in between low-power microcontroller naps. The circuit lives inside a linked leather/rubber bracelet, but you could build it into whatever you please. This project involves some precision soldering, but is otherwise quite easy!

Before you begin, make sure you’ve read the following prerequisite guides:

For this project, you will need:

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Roll-up Video Light

Using DotStar LED strips we can create a flexible, portable light source for video and photography. It can squish into small spaces, easily hang up on location, and it’s fun and simple to make.

Different lighting situations call for a different color temperature of light, so we’ll combine warm and cool white LED strips and program a Pro Trinket to adjust the light with a four-button membrane keypad.

We saw a crowdfunding campaign a while back for something similar, and when it was canceled we still wanted one. Now that we have these DotStar LED strips in the shop we can build it together.

Before you begin, read/watch the following guides:

To build this project, you will need:

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