At first glimpse, electronic “bits” that snap together under the power of magnets might not seem suitable for enduring the rigorous candy-grabbing armies that invade a house during All Hallows’
Eve. However, with some careful planning (see Figure 1)
and robust building techniques, you can assemble these
three treats in one evening. They’re perfect for adding
some excitement to your candy bowl.
Boo2U
It’s time to add some twitch to your tricks. In this
project, we’re going to animate a simple hand puppet. The
puppet will come to “life” when children come near it. This
effect is a great demonstration of four very basic littleBits
modules.
First of all, we need the ever-present power module
(p1). This little beauty gives life to all of our littleBits
creations. Just plug a 9V battery into the barrel jack found
on the p1 module, and you have a sweet portable power
supply — complete with an ON/OFF switch.
Once we’re juiced with the power module, we add a
sound trigger (i20) module. This is an input module that is
color-coded pink (or fuchsia, if you prefer). The sound
trigger works by “listening” to sound levels which then
transmits an ON signal to other connected modules when it
“hears” something. The sensitivity of this module’s hearing
is controlled by a small trimmer potentiometer (pot). When
the sound trigger hears a group of children speaking
nearby, it triggers our third module: timeout (i17). This is
another input module. Rather than listening, this module is
a “thinker.” The timeout module likes to think about turning
ON and turning OFF during a specific time interval.
Another trimmer pot controls the duration of this
module’s thinking period. A separate toggle switch sets
whether the timeout is ON then OFF, or OFF then ON.
Regardless of the switch’s state, its thinking period will
determine how long our fourth — and final — module
remains active.
Our hand puppet is controlled by a small DC motor
We've all learned about littleBits
( littlebits.cc) — the magnetically-attractive building modules —
from past issues of SERVO
Magazine (see November 2014,
December 2014, February 2015,
and June 2015). Now, it's time to
put them to real work — for
Halloween 2015!
BooBits:
Three Ghoulish
littleBits Projects
By Dave Prochnow
SERVO 09.2015 43
Figure 1. Tools of the trick trade for Halloween.