What can you do with a Particle Holiday Tree shield the rest of the year? This Halloween, I'm making mine into the brains of a motion-sensing, music-playing, light-animation-displaying, IoT Jack-o-Lantern!
Changes made
- I took Particle's firmware for the sheild and swapped out the music and light animations for Halloween-appropriate options.
- I also added the option to use Cheerlights via the Thingspeak library when you aren't using the animations
- Finally, I added a Passive Infrared (PIR) motion sensor to activate the lights and sounds as trick-or-treaters approach
- Pulse Orange: all LEDs smoothly fade in and out
- Orange Twinkle: random LEDs light up across the tree
- Addams Family theme
- Ghostbusters
- Bewitched
- I found some Halloween midi files
- I found a tool for converting a midi track to Arduino tone buzzer code
- To find the right track, I followed instructions on the site above and downloaded MidiYodi
- Often a track with a simple melody, not percussion or chords, seems to work
- I chose the Midi Speed Factor to be 1X
- The Percentage of Tone to Be Played was left at 90%
- I chose for Device, the Arduino (C, Tone) option
- To check the track, I used an Arduino simulator available at Autodesk TInkercad Circuits
- I selected the Arduino Uno and connected a piezo buzzer to pin 11 and ground
- I copied the source code and ran the simulation
- I then had to get the tones and delays into the array format used in
songs.h. I did this with a lot of ugly search-and-replace, but it could probably be done with some slick regex (wish I knew that better...)
Written by Particle and modified by David Bradway.
I welcome more animations and songs via Pull Request!
Happy Halloween! 🎃 🍬 🍫 👻