Halloween Builds
FEATURE
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DING
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WINDOWS
TO THE
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SOUL
n the front cover of this
month’s HackSpace magazine,
you’ll see one of our favourite
Halloween effects, Uncanny
Eyes. These are eyes displayed
on small screens that can be
embedded in any projects and
casually look around, blink, and generally freak
people out.
Although we’ve become accustomed to brilliantly
realistic graphics in games, these graphics require
huge amounts of processing power to create. As
most people don’t want a dedicated graphics card
in their Halloween costume, we need a powerful
microcontroller and some clever code. You just
simply can’t get this level of processing on an
Arduino Uno or similar AVR board.Powerful microcontrollers and coding tricks
necessary to make these eyes work came together
thanks to Phil Burgess (known to the Twitterverse
as PaintYourDragon), Creative Engineer at Adafruit,
and the Teensy 3.1/3.2 microcontrollers. You can
still find the guide for doing this (from 2015) here:
hsmag.cc/HjGMUs.While this works, there are easier ways of
achieving this effect these days. You can get the
effect out the box and ready to include in your
Halloween build using a HalloWing from $34.95 (for
a single eye) or MONSTER M4SK $44.95 (for two
eyes). The effect can be powered by Arm Cortex-
M0+ cores, (running 128×128 pixel displays) or more
powerful M4 cores (running 240×240 pixel displays).
It’s the quality of image that’s different between the
two display resolutions, not the physical size.
Of course, while microcontrollers might still need
all their processing might to generate eyes like this,O
WE NEED A POWERFUL
MICROCONTROLLER
AND ... CODE
You can get a
surprising range
of emotions from
just 64 LEDs