I was inspired by Phil Burgess’ great electronic mask project and knew I had to build one of my own.  The project is detailed in a combination of Adafruit tutorials on Animating Multiple LED Backpacks and the Wave Shield Voice Changer.  I thought I’d relate my experiences in building and using the mask.  Overall, it was a lot of fun.  I accompanied my daughter to a few houses on Halloween night — visibility wasn’t so good at [...]

For Halloween 2009 my daughter got a butterfly princess costume. We thought it might be nice to light it up for safety and a nice effect. I thought of EL wire, which I’d just discovered and bought some including a sequencer from CoolNeon.  I decided on a pattern involving four loops on the wings as well as an outline around the edge.  Stripping and soldering EL wire takes some patience but I found it wasn’t [...]

My daughter wanted to dress as Hermione Granger for the Halloween party at her school. We thought we’d jazz it up a bit with a special book she could hold — one which might play the Harry Potter theme song from within if it’s held in a certain way. Well, we could have really gone overboard and embedded an LCD or OLED in the pages themselves but the music would have to suffice this time [...]