While Halloween may have come and gone, we’re still picking through all the great costumes that integrated tech in some way, and we have to give a nod to this unicorn horn that uses an Arduino and GPS to track kids and give their parents some peace of mind while they trick-or-treat.

This project was created by father Ben Strahan who wanted to give his kids some freedom this Halloween without having to worry as much. The obvious solution? A unicorn horn with built-in GPS.

This started with Strahan’s daughter finding this tutorial from Adafruit to create a 3D printed unicorn horn complete with multicolored NeoPixel LEDs to give it that magical look and feel.

With the horn 3D printed at a local maker space and sowed onto a headband, the next step was the GPS. Strahan decided to go with a GSM Shield for connectivity and a SIM card from Hologram to handle the data.

All of this was connected to an Arduino UNO and the hardware was good to go.

The Hologram SIM is made to send data directly to a cloud service which, for this project was Losant. After fighting with his code for a bit, the horn could be tracked on Losant’s dashboard and finding unicorns became much easier than the fairy tales would suggest.

This project is a create mix of practicality, IoT, maker spirit as well as magic and whimsy. We’re sure these kids will remember this Halloween for years to come.

If you’d like to build your own GPS horn or adapt the tech inside of it to make something new, Strahan has created a full tutorial complete with working code which you can follow.