Halloween Hacks: Diorama-rama
posted Oct 20th 2011 12:34pm by Brian Benchofffiled under: Holiday Hacks


The folks down at LVL1, the Louisville hackerspace, are throwing a Halloween party. To showcase his building skills, LVL1 member [JAC_101] put together a Halloween diorama featuring the inner workings of Doctor Frankenstein’s laboratory.
There’s a bunch of really neat pieces that make this build great. First up is the LVL1 plasma sign. This sign is four circuits pumping a high voltage charge through Xenon flash tubes. Instead of a bright flash, a very Halloweeny Xenon plasma shoots though the tubes. The sign is constructed from four disposable camera flash circuits.
A few flickering-LED torches light Dr. Franenstein’s lair while the monster is a McDonalds happy meal toy wrapped in surgical tape and painted with UV reactive paint.
In the interests of repurposing existing materials, a plasma disc belt buckle was taken from [Seven of Nine]‘s regeneration chamber LVL1′s rave supply cabinet and provides a suitable ‘mad scientist’ aesthetic. A bit of EL wire was thrown in for good measure along with some black lights to activate the UV paint.
While Frankenstein’s lab is missing a hilariously oversize knife switch on the wall, [JAC_101] still pulled off a great build.








Do xenon flash tubes have duty cycles to be concerned about? Obviously it seems to be working fine here, but does a tube designed for very quick pulses run into problems if it’s constantly powered on for hours on end?
I ask this as the fluorescent bulb above me pretends to be a flashbulb, goodness that’s getting annoying…