Posted by Sometime in the weeks leading up to Halloween I came across a fun blog post called “Spooky motion-sensitive Halloween eyes” which detailed the construction of a pair of Arduino controlled LED matrix animated eyes connected to a motion sensor that changed the color and demeanor of the eyes from “good” to “evil” whenever it sensed movement.
I liked the evil blinking red eyes but didn’t have a need for the motion sensor or the eye changing effect. I also didn’t have any of the Adafruit bi-color LED matrices on hand, but I did have a couple of red LED matrices from Fried Circuits, which suited my needs perfectly.
So, here’s my version of the LED matrix evil eyes. I took the original code, stripped out the code for the “good” eyes and the motion sensor and changed it to use the Fried Circuits MAX7219 display driver IC based LED matrix boards. The code is available on GitHub at github.com/dragongears/LED-Matrix-Evil-Eyes.
I used a small female header to put some space between the two eyes. I didn’t have a 5 pin header in my parts chest so I used a 6 pin header and just let the extra pin hang out. I connected the controller board with some short pieces of wire to help get it out of the way and make it less noticeable in the dark.
TODO: Break out the graphics functions into their own library.
It looks great! And I’m glad to see someone else using the evil-eyes animation. It took several rounds of pencil-and-graph-paper prototyping to get the shape and movement looking right before committing it to code. 🙂
You did a great job! I think it strikes the right balance between cute and evil. It reminds me of Gremlins. 🙂