Dragon Eye staff using Hallowing M4

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michaelmeissner
 
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Joined: Wed Aug 29, 2012 12:40 am

Dragon Eye staff using Hallowing M4

Post by michaelmeissner »

It soon will be spooky season. I went to the pop-up store Spirit Halloween, and browsed their wares. While I rarely buy stuff from there and use it without modification, I do find at times their stuff can be useful as a base.

This year I noticed they had a Dragon Eye staff (https://www.spirithalloween.com/product ... 236577.uts), but of course it wasn't animated. I bought one, with the idea of adding the necessary animation.

I went through my collection of camera lens hoods, step-up rings, etc. I eventually found that a 52mm metal vented lens hood that I had purchased several years ago for previous iterations of my steampunk camera fit the eye perfectly and it raised it up so I could mount a processor and LCD combination (the eye part of the staff curves outward, which can make mounting some on top of it tricky). As I said, I already had this item, but item #265435732201 from ebay looks like what I used.

It was nice that the Hallowing M4 just fit on the lens hood, so I went with that instead of some other processor and display combo. With the M4, I browsed the available eyes in the Hallowing M4/Monster M4SK learning section (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-hal ... e-graphics). I didn't find one that matched the staff, but the demon eye was close. I used gimp to change the iris color from red to green (via Colors -> Hue-Chroma, and I set the hue level to around 80).

I used a 18650 battery I had lying around, but I could have easily used battery #1781 from Adafruit https://www.adafruit.com/product/1781 if I could have found the one I bought some time ago that still had the JST plug (one of #1781's I had converted into 2 pin 0.1" pins). In looking at my various lipo batteries, the small batteries that would fit within the lens hood probably wouldn't run the Hallowing M4 for long. I couldn't fit a convenient place to mount the wider lipos. I did find a package of mini M&Ms candy was just the right size to hold the 18650 battery, and remove it easily for charging. I've found from experience that I need to plan for being able to change the battery during cosplay events, rather than just plugging it into a wall overnight to recharge the battery. I used teal tape from the Dollar store to attach the battery to the staff.

I had the neopixel strip #3919 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3919) lying around and it plugs nicely into the Hallowing M4. The neopixel strip is a little longer than the staff, so I wound it around the staff, instead of going straight up/down the front. At the moment, I added a user code to go through both the internal 4 neopixels and the strip of 30 neopixels, changing one pixel to green, and then changing it back. Maybe later, I will add a more complex pattern, maybe not.

I put the code changes that I made, along with the snake_green eye that I did in the following zip file:
2022-09-11-14-55-022-staff.jpg
2022-09-11-14-55-022-staff.jpg (133.5 KiB) Viewed 63 times
2022-09-11-17-57-023-staff.jpg
2022-09-11-17-57-023-staff.jpg (114.32 KiB) Viewed 63 times
2022-09-11-17-59-024-staff.jpg
2022-09-11-17-59-024-staff.jpg (97.2 KiB) Viewed 63 times

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