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Halloween projects anyone?

battlecoder

So Halloween is around the corner and I was wondering if anyone here had any plans to build or "hack" Halloween decorations for the Spooky season.

Me, personally, I want to do something with a mist maker and a cauldron ... or something. I think that would be fun.

A couple of Halloweens ago I hacked this plastic skull to make it come "alive". I used a regular Arduino Uno to read WAV files from an SD card. WAV files are super easy to decode and play sound samples from, and as long as you play them back at the correct speed, which in this case was accomplished with interrupts. It was a super quick and dirty approach, but I didn't have any sound-playing module. I did have to build a small audio filter and connect it to a tiny "amp" board to drive the speaker, though.

The skull also was supposed to move the jaw while "laughing" but the tiny servo I used died once it was very securely glued in place, and I didn't have the time nor the patience to take it all apart to replace it.

Maybe I'll try to repair this skull for this Halloween too.

  • Halloween is sneaking up fast. Thanks for the reminder.

  • in reply to robogary

    It is! Do you have any project for the season in mind?

  • An idea for your skull is to animate the jaw...

     Crabby Skullduggery 

  • I am toying with the idea of designing a helmet facemask...I ordered some parts but no idea if it can be completed in time...

  • in reply to dougw

    That sounds cool. I hope you can make it. Having to wait for parts to arrive is easily one of the most stressful part of projects when there's a deadline involved.

  • in reply to dougw

    Oh that's perfect. I had a small servo inside the skull directly attached to the jaw. I don't know if it was the angle at which I mounted it, or that I drove it too hard while testing it, or something that I did wrong electronically, but it didn't last long before it stopped moving completely

  • How about a ghost? The white sheet supported on something like a long broom handle, etc., then on the inside you fit a circular ring of wood or metal or even a slightly out-of-fashion hula-hoop, mounted on the vertical broom handle so it all looks like a witches' hat roundabout as seen in play-parks when you take the grandchildren. On the ring you install 5 or 6 small-ish fans which you switch on at random intervals, run for a random time at a random speed, and switch off again. This would make the white sheet move randomly, causing random amounts of fear and distress to any passers-by, tee hee. The fans would be controlled by any random SBC with suitable I/O, the Raspberry Pi and Arduino spring to mind. If the head were made from something like a punctured (and therefore scrap) plastic football with a hole in it for the top of the broom handle, you could cut holes for eyes, and a mouth with suitably jagged teeth, with a randomly flashing bulb inside it. I did think of using an empty pumpkin shell but that would probably be a bit messy and prone to inducing random short circuits by dripping.

    All those fans and lights could all turn on at once, such is the nature of randomness. So the ghost would probably have to be mains-powered and thus for indoor use only. Given enough time you could make four ghosts, dye the sheets in Pac-Man colours, and add randomly-generated "Wakka-Wakka" sound effects before distributing them around the house. I'm sure something could be done with movement detectors too. Laugh a minute or what?

  • in reply to electronicbiker

    That's actually very clever. You would definitely need some sound to disguise the fan sounds though, so I love the idea of making it Pac-man themed with the colors and sound

  • in reply to battlecoder

    A counterweight might let the jaw rotate with less torque.

  • For me, Halloween is a fulltime event.  One of my clients 3D prints skulls (and now arm sets) as his side hustle.  I provide DMX adapters (transmitters and decoders) that he builds into his products.  For the past 6 months I have working on keeping his inventory in order and developing a new product (random motion generator with speech to jaw motion decoding, voice modification and programmable delay - to synch the sound to motion).

    Here is a short snippet of random motions (this is an early version of the product, without the voice to jaw motion).