An Animated LED Fireplace Powered By The CH32V003

Once you’ve mastered the near-magical ability of turning your ideas into a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand, it’s only natural that you’ll want to spread the joy. The holidays are a perfect time to produce a custom piece of electronics for friends and family, but there’s a catch: going from making one or two of something to making dozens of them can introduce some interesting challenges. Not only will you want to cost optimize your design, but to save yourself some aggravation, you’ll likely want to simplify the assembly process.

The fifty electronic fireplaces designed by built by [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] are a perfect example of both concepts, and while we’re coming across it a bit late for this year’s gift exchange, we wouldn’t be surprised if these MIT-licensed beauties end up under a few more trees in 2024.

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Festive PCB Gives The Gift Of Hacking

‘Tis the season for gift giving, and what better to give than a newfound love for hacking, soldering, and blinkenlights? In order to spread cheer and education at the local hackerspace, [Tom Goff] created this festive tree circuit board that can either sit in a stand to be admired, or worn as jewelry. The resistors are even designed to look like candy canes hanging from the boughs.

The brains of this festive little tree is an ATmega328P, which you probably recognize as the microcontroller that powers the Arduino Uno. Although this circuit has none of the extra bits you’d find on an Uno, not even a crystal oscillator, it can still be programmed with Arduino and use the 8 MHz internal clock.

[Tom] has provided good, thorough instructions, especially for the sticky bit of setting up the IDE to program using the 8 MHz internal clock. So even if you’re nowhere near Norwich Hackerspace, you can join in the fun. Be sure to check out the video after the break, wherein [Tom] walks through designing the PCB using Inkscape and Fritzing.

Want to whip up a little something for the hackerspace wall? Check out this Sierpinski Christmas tree.

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The Ghost Detector 9000 Is A Fun Spirit-Chasing Game

Halloween may have come and gone for another year, but we’re still finding neat spooky projects lurking out on the Interwebs. Case in point, the Ghost Detector 9000 from [Jules].

Effectively, what you’re looking at here is a fun interactive ghost-detecting game. It consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero hooked up with an IMU sensor that can detect the rig’s movement and orientation. As the user moves the Ghost Detector 9000 around, it outputs lights and sound when it’s aimed at a so-called “ghost-signal”. The user then pulls the trigger to “capture” the ghost. The whole rig is built inside a flashlight which presented a useful form factor for modification.

For those eager to dive into the nitty-gritty, [Jules] has shared the project files on GitHub. There’s some nifty stuff going on, like Rust code that interfaces with I2C devices hooked up to the Pi, and a sensor-fusion algorithm to make the most out of the data from the 9-axis IMU.

It’s a fun build that probably taught [Jules] a great deal along the way, even if it’s a game at heart. If you prefer to shoot zombies instead of capture ghosts, we’ve seen a build that lets you go hunting with a laser crossbow, too.

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Backyard UFO Is Out Of This World

Halloween may be over for another year, but UFOs in your yard are cool year-round. This one might take the cake. [frydom.john]’s excellent UFO is fully programmable and contains about 2000 addressable RGB LEDs, smoke, a laser-lit ramp, and of course, an alien crew.

Under the hood of the wooden frame, you’ll find a Teensy 4.1 running the blinkenlights. There’s also a hacked smoke machine, because what’s a UFO without smoke or fog emanating from underneath? There are six PC fans to blow it around and recycle it, and the ramp runs on a linear actuator.

[frydom.john]’s project notes (PDF), which they refer to as ‘scrappy/hacky’ are also available. We beg to differ a bit on the scrappy/hacky part; it’s 60 pages long and full of photos and diagrams and charts. Even so, it may not be enough for you to replicate this extraterrestrial vehicle, so [frydom.john] is open to questions. Be sure to check this thing out after the break.

Want to have your UFO lift off of the ground? It’s possible with the Coandă effect.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Spooky Noise Maker Is Self-Contained

We just love it when y’all build off of each other’s projects. This spooky Halloween noise maker from [C.M. Herron] is no exception. But while the projects we’ve seen lately rely on external computers and/or guitar pedals to create the effects part of the build, this one has everything running on a Raspberry Pi that sits inside the box.

Readers of a certain vintage will recognize this as an 8-track storage box, on top of which are several noise-making objects that creak and ting and reverberate nicely. A USB microphone picks up the sounds, and by using a regular microphone instead of a piezo, [C.M.] can introduce varying levels of feedback to make the sounds even spookier.

So, how did [C.M.] make this work on a Pi 4? To put it simply, they’ve got the Reaper DAW and Windows Valhalla plugins running on top of WINE, which running on top of Box64, which is running on top of the Bullseye Pi OS. [C.M.] sure learned a lot from this build, and hopes to inspire others to build their own spooky noise boxen. Plus, they’ve already thought of ways to improve it for next year. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Converted Proton Pack Lights Up The Night

It’s really quite unfortunate that Hackaday/Supplyframe employees and their families are not allowed to place in the 2023 Halloween Hackfest, because our own [Tom Nardi] has thrown down a costume gauntlet with his kids’ proton pack conversion.

Starting with an inert off-the-shelf toy from 2021, [Tom] set out to make the thing more awesome in every way possible. For one thing, it’s blue, and outside of the short-lived animated series The Real Ghostbusters, who ever heard of a blue proton pack? So one major change was to paint it matte black and age it with the old silver rub ‘n buff technique. And of course, add all the necessary stickers.

[Tom] added plenty of blinkenlights, all running off of an Arduino Nano clone and a pair of 18650s. He got lucky with the whole power cell thing, because an 8 x 5050 RGB LED stick fits there perfectly and looks great behind a PETG diffusing lens. He also drilled out and lit up the cyclotron, because what’s a proton pack without that? There’s even a 7-segment LED voltmeter so Dad can check the power level throughout the night.

Finally, he had to do a bit of engineering to make the thing actually wearable by his daughter. A frame made of square aluminium tubing adds strength, and a new pair of padded straps make it comfortable. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Quoth The Raven, “Caww!”

Sometimes, projects start in somewhat unlikely places. This one began when [Istvan Raduly] scored a fake raven at a neighbor’s garage sale and decided to turn it into a thunder-and-lightning decoration that would frighten even the bravest trick-or-treater.

Get close enough to this raven and you’ll set off the PIR sensor, which triggers lighting and sound effects, including some spooky glowing and blinking red eyes, general cawing, and of course, thunder. The light comes from a whopping 10-watt, 12-volt power LED. This bird’s brain is an Arduino Nano, which is protected from the 12V supply with a boost converter. As you might expect, the sounds are on an SD card and played through a DF Player Mini.

Spookiness aside, our favorite part might be the absolutely lovely job that [Istvan] did decorating the raven’s base. Hiding electronics and hot glue is one thing, but this is above and beyond. Be sure to check it out after the break, both in the safety of the house, and outside in the scary darkness.

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