The goal of this project was to make a ghost that would 'float' from tree to tree across my front yard.
I was able to achieve this with an Arduino Uno knockoff, an Adafruit V1 Motor Shield a couple of microswitches as limit switches and an assortment of pulleys, nylon spacers, perforated aluminum plates & arms and bunch o' fasteners from the hardware store.
The final result is shown in the attached video clip. The Ghost slides on a length of 80lb fishing line anchored to each tree. The ghost hangs from a nylon bushing with the anchored line running through it. More line is attached to either end of the bushing the ghost hangs from forming a loop via pulleys attached to each tree. This loop is driven by a spool with the loop line wound around it attached to the shaft of the 12V motor.
Little balls of masking tape act as limit switch actuators and trip the switches causing the motor to change direction when the ghost gets too close to the tree.
The ghost is illuminated by a 3V tri-colored LED attached to a coin cell.
Here's more detailed pictures of the setup for the sake of documentation:
Shown below is the ghost on it's tow lines:
In the image below you can see (from bottom to top) the top of the approach limit switch assembly, the motor & spooler, the farside limit switch assembly and the top guide pulley.
You can see a zip tie guiding the fishing line as it exits the spool just above it. When I set the whole thing back up after the rain we had, the motor spool kept driving the line towards the motor and the line was getting caught up in the screws attaching the spool to the motor adapter. This zip tie kept that in check. You can see my overuse of zip ties in this project. They made assembly quick and allowed for easy adjustments for this project that was only meant to be in use for about 4 hours.
A last minute addition was this skeleton I picked up at a local Walmart. I ziptied a mini servo to it's back, flashed a nodeMCU with some modified Arduino IDE ESP8266 servo sample code, & lit up it's eyes with more LEDs and another coin cell. The ends of the servo adapter have - you guessed it - more fishing line routed through the skeleton's clavicle and attached to each wrist. The motion of all that is enough to make the skeleton dance when hung from more fishing line as shown in the clip below.
This was my setup for Halloween 2017. There's alot of room for improvement for next year. Hope to spend some time improving things over the next 12 months.
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