They can be mounted directly on the Flora with no extra support or wiring and are a good match for wearables (small and easy to use). These are used to tune the color of the heart and the beating frequency. Rounding up the electronic components are two 10k trimmer potentiometers. If using a smaller battery, make sure that the discharge rate can be accommodated and that the capacity is sufficient for the application. The one I used is a 1200mAh, which is of a nice size for this type of wearable, but other sizes can be used. Portable power is provided by a single cell Lithium Ion Polymer battery. The newer versions will work just as well.

Note: I used an older Flora v1 for the project. It can also be powered directly from a 1-cell LiIon battery, and works 'well enough' (for a quickie) driven by the Flora's 3.3V signal pads. It is easy to control it with a single data wire and pixel color is controllable. It also has a connector for a battery, so this project can be built without external power-related components.įor the beating heart itself, the Adafruit 8x8 Neopixel Matrix is an ideal (if somewhat expensive) base. It can be done with pretty much any small Arduino board, but the form-factor of the Flora and the number of IOs available makes it a perfect platform. This project is based on an Arduino-compatible Adafruit Flora, their larger wearable platform. The animation in the main image shows the beating heart assembled underneath the black fabric of the costume. I ended up grabbing an old vampire set I had and made this beating heart to put underneath. I found myself with about 45 minutes to come up with a costume and some fun add-on. This was my 2016 Halloween quick project.

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