Sharon picked up some cheap styrofoam heads from a store that had previously used them to display wigs for use in a decoration project of hers for this Halloween. I got her to pick up a couple more for me to use. After some discussion and ideas Aaron and I decided that it would be creepy to have lights flashing on them in a random fashion. This sounded like exactly the project I wanted to use my TI MSP430 Launchpad for. I don't have very much microcontroller experience - pretty much just making lights flash on or off - so that's perfect.
I managed to get a MSP430 development environment up and running on Linux pretty easily. It was just:
apt-get install mspdebug gcc-msp430
The code is pretty simple. Two digital IO pins drive the LEDs and a watchdog timer wakes up every 32ms to decide if an LED should be turned on or off or left alone. In the end much of the code is overkill for such a simple application, but it does look kind of cool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXUiQ8ZFHhY