Halloween spooky Pumpkin with ESP8266

This project is an example application for ESP8266, a Styrofoam pumpkin illuminated by Neopixel LED ring and a mp3 sound output based on DFPlayer.

An additional PIR motion sensor connected via an interrupt input recognizes movements in the environment and causes the LED light pattern to switch from a cozy fire imitation to a "spooky" blue-green as well as playing any scary sounds in mp3 format from microSD card.

The basic idea comes from the blog at AZ-Delivery: https://www.az-delivery.de/blogs/azdelivery-blog-fur-arduino-und-raspberry-pi/halloween-2019-der-kuerbis-erwacht-wieder.

Visual impressions

Here you can see the complete Halloween Pumpkin arrangement:

This is an image of the breadboard mounted on the LiPo battery pack:

I have also made a little video clip and uploaded it to YT (do a CTRL+click for opening in new tab of your browser):

Parts list

Following parts I have used in this project:

• breadboard half+ (400 holes)
• wire jumpers
• LiPo battery pack
• USB cable with mini USB plug
• breadboard power supply (with Mini-USB-Input)
• Wemos D1 Mini pro (ESP8266)
• Neopixel RGB LED ring, diameter 50 mm (with 12 seperate controllable RGB LEDs by WS2812B chip)
• DFPlayer mini MP3 player module
• microSD card (16 GB)
• passive speaker (2 W, 8 Ohm)
• PIR module (motion sensor based on HC-SR501)
• resistor 1 kOhm (for protecting RxD input of DFPlayer)
• capacitor 1000 µF (protecting the Neopixel LED module)

Breadboard layout and schematics

With Fritzing (https://fritzing.org) I have created following breadboard layout:

The schematics looks like this:

Software libraries and documentation

Neopixel RGB LED ring

Install the FastLED library: https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED.

DFPlayer Mini

Install the DFMiniMp3 library "DFPlayer Mini Mp3 by Makuna": https://github.com/Makuna/DFMiniMp3. Documentation you will find at: https://wiki.dfrobot.com/DFPlayer_Mini_SKU_DFR0299.

PIR module

The sensor output pin has to be connected to a interrupt capable input pin. No special library is needed. Cover the interrupt service routine (ISR) by ICACHE_RAM_ATTR to run the interrupt code in RAM, otherwise code is stored in flash and it’s slower.

void ICACHE_RAM_ATTR interrupt_pir_motion_detection() {

}

SDcard: file/folder layout

The DFPlayer and the DFMiniMp3 library expects the sd card to contain these mp3 files like this folder/file scheme:

sd:/mp3/0001_xxx.mp3
sd:/mp3/0002_xxx.mp3
sd:/mp3/0003_xxx.mp3

License

This project is licensed under the terms of "GNU General Public License v3.0". For details see LICENSE.