REVIEW
MONSTER M4SK
MONSTER M4SK
@ben_everardAdd animated eyes to your Halloween get-up
et’s be honest: these are for
one thing, and one thing only –
Halloween. There are two 240×240
pixel SPI screens connected to a
SAMD51 ARM M4F microcontroller.
There are also three buttons if you
want to trigger different effects, and an audio jack for
sound output.
You’ll almost certainly want to use this on the go, so
there’s a LiPo battery port and charging circuit.
In their most basic use, you just plug the power in,
wait a few seconds, and they’re on and looking around.
There are four mounting holes positioned, so it’s easy
to tie (or zip-tie) these onto costumes, if it’s not
appropriate to bolt them on. These can also be used to
hold on a pair of hemispherical lenses (sold separately)
to give these a more eye-like look, particularly if you
mount them inside some other make – imagine these
eyes poking out through a piece of clothing or a prop.By Ben EverardL
Below
These TFT screens emit
light, so work brilliantly
in darkened rooms
Right
There’s enough
connectivity to add
quite a bit of extra
hardware to your
Halloween costume,
and power it from your
MONSTER M4SKADAFRUIT $44.95 adafruit.comThe quality of the screen and animation is
stunningly good. The original name for this eye
animation (when it was first coded by Phil Burgess to
work on the Teensy) was Uncanny Eyes, and they
really are uncanny. For us, it’s the animation rather
than the realism of the image (though this is also
impressive) that gives real personality.
There’s plenty you can customise about the eyes,
and there’s a detailed guide for doing this here:
hsmag.cc/oPgysD. You can do much of the
customisation without getting your hands dirty with
programming – the device shows up as a USB disk
when plugged into a computer via USB, and you can
tweak configurations and image textures without
having to recompile.
The mask is designed so the eyes are the same
distance apart as on the average human, but if you
want more or less, you can detach the two halves of
the PCB (see the dotted lines around the nose? Those