October 25, 2021

Turning an Apartment Into a Giant Cheshire Cat Face

from hackster.io

Halloween displays seem to get larger and more intricate every year, and this year is no different, as Ryan Harbert makes evident with the DIY Cheshire Cat Apartment Building.

The cat spans two floors and uses 1,100 WS2812b individually addressable RGB pixels, three 300-pixel PCBs and four 50 pixels in a Christmas-like form factor, which creates the cat’s mouth.

The pixels are driven by an ESP8266, which acts as the primary module with Wi-Fi and supports the cat’s left eye, an ESP32 that acts as the right and a WT32-ETH01 module that provides Ethernet support.

The eyes themselves were crafted using cardboard cutouts with a pair of LED DMX PARs that light up for different colored irises. The setup is tied together using an Enttec DMX USB Pro 2 module and is powered by a trio of 150W (5 V/30 A) power supplies.

The Cheshire Cat makes use of the open-source xLights and WLED Project platforms to control the myriad of lights, which makes for a great Halloween light show.