Category Archives: Holiday Hacks

Mini Millennium Falcon Is Envy Of the Neighborhood

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Here’s a tip for any readers who may be expecting a child in the near future: there’s about a two year period where you can basically use your child as a Halloween prop. They’re too young to express any serious interest in what they want to dress up as, and as an added bonus, they generally spend most of their time being rolled around in a wheeled contraption anyway. As long as you can keep the little one warm and securely seated in the thing, you’ve essentially got free reign to put them into all sorts of elaborate vehicles.

Case …read more

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The Internet of Jack-O’-Lanterns

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As the candy rush fades, the Halloween hacks continue pouring in. [Jeremy S Cook] has taken a few fundamental concepts and dressed them up inside the smartest pumpkin on the block.

This pumpkin has a WEMOS D1 Mini ESP8266 brain, LED eyes in place of a candle for illumination, and a small USB power bank for power. The code [Cook] is using is a modified sketch by YouTuber [Innovative Tom], which creates a server on your network — don’t forget to insert your network credentials! — that enable control of the LEDs from your computer or smart phone.

[Cook] has …read more

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Pumpkin Piano Promises a Gourd Time

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Fall – it’s that time of year that brings falling leaves, Hallowe’en, and a pumpkin version of everything that you hold dear. In this case, it’s not a latte – it’s [Robert Vorthman]’s Pumpkin Piano.

[Robert] took a straightforward approach to the build, pressing a Raspberry Pi into service as the backbone of the operation. This is combined with an Adafruit breakout board for the MPR121, which is a chip that provides 12 capacitive touch-sensitive inputs. These are connected to the bountiful produce which make up the piano keys in this fun holiday hack. [Robert] uses some Python code that …read more

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Haunting A Smart Mirror With Hue and Alexa

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So, your smart mirror has been running for a while, but Halloween is coming up and you want to come up with some cool Halloween stuff to display on the mirror. If you’re looking for ideas, check out [Ben Eagan]’s cool Haunted Smart Mirror which connects the mirror via a Raspberry Pi with Amazon Alexa and Phillips Hue lighting.

[Ben] points to another of his blog pages for those readers interested in the nuances of setting up Alexa with a smart mirror, while concentrating on communication with the Hue bridge and creating the setup for a new Alexa command in …read more

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Listen to the Netherworld with Artificial Intelligence

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It’s that time of year again, and with Halloween arguably being the hacker’s perfect holiday, we’re starting to see a tick up in projects with a spooky theme. Most seem to do with making some otherwise tame Halloween decorations scarily awesome, but this is different — using artificial intelligence to search for ghosts.

It seems like [Matt Reed]’s “DeepWhisper” project is meant to be taken as light-hearted fun for the spooky season, but there may be a touch of seriousness to his efforts to listen in on ghostly conversations. The principle behind this is electronic voice phenomena (EVP), whereby the …read more

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A Very MIDI Christmas Lightshow

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Christmas light displays winking and flashing in sync to music are a surefire way to rack up views on YouTube and annoy your neighbours. Inspired by one such video, [Akshay James] set up his own display and catalogued the process in this handy tutorial to get you started on your own for the next holiday season.

[James], using the digital audio workstation Studio One, took the MIDI data for the song ‘Carol of the Bells’ and used that as the light controller data for the project’s Arduino brain. Studio One sends out the song’s MIDI data, handled via the Hairless …read more

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Raspberry Pi Home Automation for the Holidays

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When you want to play around with a new technology, do you jump straight to production machinery? Nope. Nothing beats a simplified model as proof of concept. And the only thing better than a good proof of concept is an amusing proof of concept. In that spirit [Eric Tsai], alias [electronichamsters], built the world’s most complicated electronic gingerbread house this Christmas, because a home-automated gingerbread house is still simpler than a home-automated home.

Yeah, there are blinky lights and it’s all controlled by his smartphone. That’s just the basics. The crux of the demo, however, is the Bluetooth-to-MQTT gateway that …read more

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Engineer’s Primer on DIY Christmas Light Shows

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Each year brings new Christmas light shows, with synchronised music and wild blinking decorations to light your eyeballs ablaze. Now, many of us have dabbled in the dark arts of blinken, tinkering with LEDs or flashing a neon bulb or two. There’s plenty of tutorials on how to control all manner of lights, but they’re often written for novices. Learning the basics of electronics for the nth time when you just need to know the specifics of a protocol or what IC you need can be a total drag. That’s why [Bill Porter] has written the Engineer’s Guide to DIY …read more

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Laser-Cut Gingerbread Trailer Home

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Ah, the holiday gingerbread house. A traditional — if tedious — treat; tasking to create, delicious to dismantle, so why not try applying some maker skills to making the job of building it easier? [William Osman] decided to try two unorthodox approaches to the gingerbread construct; first, he opted to build a gingerbread mobile home. Secondly, he cut the pieces out with a laser cutter.

After the tumultuous task of baking the gingerbread sheets, [Osman] modeled the trailer in SolidWorks and set to work cutting it out on his home-built, 80W laser cutter. Twice. Be sure to double check the …read more

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Wifi-Controlled Christmas Ornaments!

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Trimming one’s Christmas tree can be an enjoyable tradition year after year, but every once in a while some variation on  the established order can be just as fun. Seeking some new ornaments to and desiring to flex his skills, Instrucables user [Gosse Adema] created a LED-illuminated, phone-controlled, deltrahedron Christmas tree ornaments.

Wemos DI Mini Pros are the brains of these little guys, WS2182b RGB LED strips — being the superb go-to’s that they are — light the ornament, and a 5 V power supply keep them lit. [Adema] used the Wemos specifically to create a web server unique to …read more

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