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Today is Halloween and this holiday provides a wonderful excuse to hack on some spooky-themed projects.
We've curated a few of our favorite Halloween hacks in this post, ranging from a Raspberry Pi-controlled pumpkin to a Dracula dark theme for your Terminal.
Pumpkin Pi
This cleverly-named Pumpkin Pi project combines a Raspberry Pi with some custom open source Python code and a carved-out pumpkin to create a high-tech Jack o'Lantern.
The Jack o'Lantern can be controlled to change the colors of the LED lights inside the face and a motion sensor triggers a unique lighting sequence for people when they walk by.
Spotify-Powered Halloween Sound Effects
This Halloween Sound Effects using Spotify and Raspberry Pi project uses a Spotify playlist with Halloween sounds to power the hardware hack. Check out the accompanying video to see how it works.
Dracula Dark Theme
Dracula is a beautiful dark theme for Terminal, Sublime Text, Vim, Slack, Visual Studio Code and many other applications.
The code for each application is provided as open source under their respective Git repositories on GitHub.
Dark Magic Arduino Light Strip
Combining the Arduino Uno, Raspberry Pi and several Adafruit light strip LEDs creates an incredible hardware project that is an impressive addition to any collection of front lawn Halloween decorations.
The project requires a Raspberry Pi 3B, Adafruit Bluefruit NRF52 and Arduino Uno as well as several other bits that are listed in the Git repository's README.
The Mysteries of the Pythonic Temple
Staying in tonight instead of collecting candy from your neighbors? Enjoy learning more programming by playing the new mysterious TwilioQuest 3 mission, The Mysteries of the Pythonic Temple.
Spooky Things You Can But Shouldn't Do in Python
This post on Weird Things You Can, But Probably Shouldn't Do in Python is not specific to Halloween, but it scares the heck out of me as a PEP-compliant Python developer. Did you know you can swap the values of integers between -5 and 256 using the ctypes module? Or that you can modify other modules programmatically using imp? These techniques are a scary way to ruin your colleagues' day by pulling a switcheroo on how their code runs.
That's a wrap on our favorite Halloween hacks this year. Stay safe out there while trick-or-treating and Happy Halloween from Twilio!