New Guide: Tree Ent Sculpture with Animated OLED Eyes and Motion Reactivity

Check out the latest guide from Erin St. Blaine: make an oak tree sculpture from cardboard, pipe insulation or pool noodles, and expanding foam. Bring it to life with Adafruit’s Monster M4sk and a PIR sensor, so the eyes “wake up” when someone approaches the tree.

From the guide:

Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

– Treebeard the Ent

JRR Tolkien

Your best projects are certainly worth taking a very long time to build. Luckily, the genius programmers at Adafruit have taken the time to create and build the amazing Monster M4sk — a plug-and-play TFT display “mask” that makes bringing life to your props and creatures incredibly easy.

Power it with a USB cable or battery and upload custom graphics with drag-and-drop. In just minutes, your project will wake up, blink a few times, and proceed to delight and astonish anyone who encounters it.

This tutorial goes into detail about the Monster M4sk setup process, and gives a lot of info about how I built the tree to house it. It’s not a step-by-step tree-build tutorial, but it will definitely give you the tools and a road map of how to create your own tree or monster or movie prop using expanding foam and a few simple hand tools.

See the full tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System:

https://learn.adafruit.com/tree-ent-sculpture-with-animated-eyes