[gwfong] was in a bind. He had to make a unique Halloween prop that dispensed candy to young trick-or-treaters at a Haunted House. He decided on a conveyor belt system and besides being functional, it also had to be inexpensive to make. After poking around the hardware store [gwfong] had an idea: make it out of items he can re-use after Halloween!

As you can see, the main roller system is made of paint rollers. These are cheap and certainly re-useable after the conveyor is disassembled. Luckily for the project, the handle of the paint roller just happens to fit very snugly into a 3/4″ PVC pipe fitting. Four T-fittings and some short lengths of PVC pipe were purchased and are used to mount the paint rollers to a wooden base. A piece of canvas cut to length and sewed into a continuous loop makes up the conveyor belt. A loose belt certainly won’t deliver any candy so two turnbuckles, one at each end, keep the belt tight on the rollers.

There is a DC motor that spins a pulley which is coupled, via a standard rubber band, to one of the end paint rollers. A full-speed conveyor haphazardly flinging candy around wouldn’t work out to well so an Arduino and motor shield are used to control the conveyor’s speed and duration. A 7.4 5000mAh Li-Po battery provides the necessary electricity for a nights-worth of un-tethered candy dispensing.