Halloween Props: Dancing Spider

[Isaac] grabbed the motor from an old printer and used it to make a spider run up and down the wall for Halloween. A PIC 12F683 uses a MOSFET to drive the motor. The program loop has a little bit of dramatic flare to it, raising the arachnid with a bit of a jerky motion to give it some life, then wait for a time before quietly lowering the spider (hopefully onto an unsuspecting party-goer).  The driver board is set up for two motors, making it easy to reuse in future projects. This is quite effective, and the only addition we might suggest is to add a couple of red LEDs as some glowing eyes.

Take a look at the finished product after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl839oufN3g]

4 thoughts on “Halloween Props: Dancing Spider

  1. Dear hackaday editorial staff…

    If you want to stop your social media experiment from becoming a sodden mess of SEO spam (without a nickle coming from it), you should probably turn off links in user names.

    http://hackaday.com/2010/10/15/adafruit-industries-opens-a-job-board/#comment-198529

    Sooner or later you’ll need moderation, which is sad, but you need a method for gutting obvious advertising spam. The guys who manipulate social media for SEO are pretty good at it.

    You can spot them by their history of single sentence content-free comments, designed to let them establish sleeper accounts… and by their linked to websites.

    I wish I could offer advice, especially since I’d never create or log into an account for posting. The folks at serverfault have a decent method – you can hop on, post a few things, and then use your rep to post more. It isn’t very favorable to trolls and cranks like me, but it’s a good compromise.

    While I wish that comments could be edited by the possessor of the magic cookie, the biggest issue is that you should be prepared for the SEO attacks that you’re now facing.

    Welcome to the big boy’s table! :)

  2. bilbao bob: Those seo guys are testing if their method works, or otherwise completely retarded: HaD adds rel=nofollow to their links so Google doesn’t do anything with it; as far as I know no SEO can be gained from linking in that fashion.

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