DIY Hallowe'en Electronics at Big Mess o' Wires

Steve over at Big Mess o’ Wires has posted a terrific writeup of the Hallowe’en LED project he did with his daughter. His description of the project begins like this: I’ve been working with my daughter Alice on an LED lightboard project for Halloween, and today we finished the construction. Whew! We started out two […]
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Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Steve over at Big Mess o' Wires has posted a terrific writeup of the Hallowe'en LED project he did with his daughter. His description of the project begins like this:

I’ve been working with my daughter Alice on an LED lightboard project for Halloween, and today we finished the construction. Whew!

We started out two weeks ago with a giant 4 foot x 2 foot pegboard from Home Depot, and ambitious plans to make various Halloween shapes by populating specific holes. Reality quickly sunk in, though, as we realized how much work it would take to do something interesting with a 1152 hole pegboard.

We eventually settled on building a much smaller 8 x 8 fully-populated LED matrix instead, controlled through software to make a variety of patterns and designs.

The final product is pretty impressive, as Steve's daughter demonstrates in the following video:

The full writeup over at Steve's blog discusses the design and build of the project, giving insight into the challenges and constraints he faced along the way.

As a GeekDad, I'm particularly impressed that Steve was able to get his daughter involved. Judging by her reaction in the video, she enjoyed the project a lot, and it looks like Steve may have found himself an enthusiastic assistant for future mad-science endeavors.

And while you're over at Steve's blog, be sure to check out Plus-Too, his FPGA-based Mac Plus replica. We previously discussed that project here at GeekDad.