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Interactive Halloween Book

A Halloween book that is interactive with video, gifs, sounds, and keycaps.

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This Halloween Book has interactive capabilities that involve horror image clips with sounds that you can control by keycaps.

This project is called the Interactive Halloween Book. It was made from a very old book purchased from a thift store.

This uses keycaps for interactive input

The video demonstration can be viewed at either link below:

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Gavin02639495/status/1446528264600698880

Youtube:

The details of the Interactive Halloween book is as follows:

This project uses CircuitPython version 6.3

The front of the book has an Adafruit Clue which displays a gif.

  Once you open the book, it displays an Adafruit PyPortal that displays a few horror gifs which are situated as a TV (with a 3D printed TV(file is attached) surrounded by acrylic to display as a room.

  On the other side of the page, it displays a Nextion display, a PICO and a Neokey embedded into the book page(s). An additional Adafruit Neokey is on the side of the book connected by Stemma for additional function.

  The way it works is once you open the book, you can press the Adafruit neokey(s) which at that point, will display an image of horror along with an associated sound byte and will change the color of the neopixels on the opposite side of the page (with the TV gifs) and change the color of the neopixels on the 2 Adafruit neokeys. 

  Once a key is pressed the PICO will send data (via UART RX/TX) to the Nextion display to display that image associated with that keypress. In addition, the PICO will pull an associated GPIO pin low to that associated GPIO on the Adafruit FX board to play an associated sound byte for that image. 

  The main LiPo battery can be recharged via the Adafruit Powerboost 1000.

I had a working prototype option for the project to automatically open the book cover, but my Adafruit TB6612 motor controller board was damaged and I could not order the board in time to include it. the video of the prototype is in the file section named 'BookCoverOpen.mov'.

PiPicoHolder.stl

3D printed holder for Raspi Pico

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 50.86 kB - 10/11/2021 at 16:05

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PrototypeHalloweenBook.MOV

Video of early prototyping project

quicktime - 27.38 MB - 10/11/2021 at 11:04

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HalloweenBookFX_Sound.fzz

Shows PICO GPIO mapping and Neokey #1 & #2 to Adafruit FX soundboard trigger

fzz - 167.89 kB - 10/11/2021 at 10:36

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BookCoverOpen.mov

prototyped auto book cover open. but not added to final project

quicktime - 8.56 MB - 10/09/2021 at 18:10

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BookBeforePaint.jpg

Book before paint is applied

JPEG Image - 655.10 kB - 10/09/2021 at 18:03

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  • 1 × Raspberry Pi PICO Main Microcontroller Board
  • 1 × Adafruit FX Sound Board Used to add audio
  • 1 × Adafruit Clue Board Used in Book Front Display
  • 1 × Adafruit Pyportal Used to display multiple gifs
  • 2 × Adafruit Neokey Used for key input

View all 15 components

View all 9 project logs

  • 1
    Design Concept Process and Book Compartment Carve Out Step

     Below are some early design adaptations I made when thinking up ideas for the book. These were concepts I thought up, some of which were not used (see below). Some of the concepts were used while other concepts were thrown out. Again, this shows the concepts throughout my thought process. Some of the thrown-out concepts were due to book space limitations and time. As far as it relates to appearance, my goal is to not make the book too neat. I wanted to give an old decrypted look. So, the book outside and inside would not look totally intact. Because ideally, the Halloween book should look centuries old.

      Depending on how the number of electronics you're going to embed into the Halloween book, you must choose a book that will have the space that you need. I chose a rather thick book that I purchased from a second-hand store. I need at least 4 compartments to house my electronics since I used over 7 different boards.  Next, you have to carve out the needed compartments to house the electronics. I used a knife, I then used a Dremel with a circular cutting bit to speed and exact the space I needed.  

      After carving out sections of the inside of the book, I applied mod podge to give a more firm and sturdy compartment.

    After the mod podge dried I would then paint some of the inside sections with black acrylic paint.

    For the section where the displays were going to be housed, I painted them brown. Again, this is after the mod podge dried. I then painted that section brown. and stage the fitting of the inserts.

  • 2
    Book Exterior Appearance Step

      The third step is to start with the exterior of the book. I wanted to include some 3D printed Halloween effects such as a spider, skull, bone, etc.. So, I 3D printed those items. This is custom. You can add anything you want. Once printed, I glued them to the front of the book with hot glue. To create the spiderweb, I used hot glue.  Once everything was glued in place I went to the next step.

      The next step is to create a leathery, skin-type appearance. To do this, I used thin tissues and/or thin paper tiles. I damped the paper with water, laid it over the front first. Then I used a medium-sized artist brush and brushed on the mod podge glue. The wrinkles in the paper help with the effect.  The more wrinkles the better it gives the old look (in my opinion)...see below. I let it dry and then moved to the back of the book and then the spine of the book. You can view a photo of the book before paint is applied, this photo is in the file section with the name 'BookBeforePaint.jpg'. 

      Once all was dry the next step was to apply the coloring. For this, I used a combination of colors/paint. I first used a wood stain (Red Oak) with a brownish color. I used about 3 coats, let it dry. I then accented it with some black, then gold paint to give the oldish antique look. Once completed and dried, I moved to the inside of the book. Once all is dry, the outcome should look similar to what's shown below.

  • 3
    Internal Wiring Step

      Since the compartments were completed already, I made holes for the wiring runs. I used the spine of the book to run the wire from front to middle to back and so forth. The book spine served as the wire conduit (see below). I used thin 30 gauge wire wrap. This wire is good since it could easily handle the voltage and current load.

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katherinewallitonejohn wrote 10/04/2022 at 19:48 point

The book is a great way to introduce your child to the spooky world of Halloween. It has a lot of fun activities and games that will help them learn about the history of Halloween and have fun while they do it. This is a perfect book to get your child in the mood for Halloween, and it will definitely be a hit with them. Here you can read out about  job for latin american students in the  Education sector which is highly paid profession in the present era.

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