It seems every year, Hack A Day is a little bit behind the times when it comes to Halloween hacks. Builds like the Mario costumes and the house singing Thriller are great, but it makes a lot more sense for us to post them before Halloween.
To introduce our Halloween theme, we’d like to present [heavyweighthowe]’s Halloween project. It’s a small lighting automation build that syncs a string of lights to the theme of the best Halloween Christmas 2nd best [Tim Burton] movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. [heavyweighthowe] used Vixen to sequence the lights and an Arduino to interpret the serial commands from Vixen. It’s a nice build that would look great sitting on a porch next to a giant bowl of candy.
If you’ve got a Halloween build you’d like to show off, like a haunted house ride an awesome costume or even a really great Jack-O-Lantern, send it in on the tip line. We’re planning on putting up at least one Halloween post a day, so keep sending in those builds.
Here’s my idea:
Create a mirror frame with a monitor (or tablet) behind it. Hook it up to a motion sensor, and as someone walks up to it, it kicks on with an eerie video of a floating ghostly figure of some sort.
They have things like this in halloween stores already, but they’re just static images. A video could really make it look cool.
One of these has already been created, and is pretty awesome:
http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Magic-Mirror/
http://diymagicmirror.com
Does anyone know where to get some free CD quality ‘horror’ wav/mp3 sounds? You know, wolf growling/howling, chains being dragged, screaming etc., as most of the wavs I find on the web are dated back to pre-mp3 days where quality was sacrificed to save disc space and they all sound terrible (8bit mono wav sucks).
I’ve got some TTL controlled SD mp3 player modules I’d love to rig up to a microcontroller and some PIR sensor I have in my kit box for halloween, to scare the living daylights out of anyone coming near my house that night. Along with some glowing eyes dotted around the place.
Royalty free sounds, mein freund: http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/soundfx/scary_halloween_sounds.shtml
Halloween hacker…sounds like a movie about a serial killer with a machete!
Hmmm…I’ll have to wire my doorbell so that it sounds like someone cocking a pump-action…that will scare those little bastards!!!