2023 Halloween Hackfest: Flickering Pumpkin Pin Is Solidly Built

October 4, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Now first of all, [Steph] grants that you can already take your pick of several LED pumpkin badges out there on IO. That’s not the point. The point is that this flickering pumpkin pin is nicely-built as well as being open source.

Even though it’s fully featured — it flickers, it’s wearable, and it’s lightweight — the build couldn’t be more simple. It’s fancy through-hole LEDs and a coin cell holder, plus a tack pin to stick it through your shirt. But the final result is quite elegant thanks to clever use of PCB layering.

The first version was to get all the layers right to let the light through and embellish the jack-o-lantern’s lines with manufacturer-applied silver solder, but as [Steph] points out, it looked ‘like something a disturbed child might carve into their desk in detention’. So [Steph] enlisted [Mx. Jack Nelson], who improved the artwork.

Pretty much every component does double duty here, including the tack pin — it serves as a switch because it can hold the battery in place. The battery’s edges reflect the glowing light quite nicely around the edge of the pin. And the LEDs beneath the battery prevent it from slipping out. You can see how it goes together in the video after the break.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Treat Trough Of Terror Is Actually Pretty Cute

October 3, 2023 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Even though it seems the worst of COVID has passed, October generally kicks off cold and flu season, so why not continue to pass out Halloween treats in a socially-distanced fashion?

That is, of course the idea behind [Gord Payne]’s Halloween Treat Trough of Terror. Lay a treat at the top of the trough and it will activate the LED strips that follow the treat down to the end, as well as some spooky sounds. The treat in question is detected by an SR-04 ultrasonic distance sensor connected to an Arduino Nano.

All in all this was a highly successful build as far as neighborhood entertainment value goes. Toddlers stared in awe at the blinkenlights, teenagers proclaimed it ‘sick’, and we can only assume that the adults were likely happy to see something aimed at kids that’s not scary.

[Gord] has a nice how-to if you want to build your own, and of course, the Arduino sketch is available. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.

Don’t have room to build a treat slide? Here’s a socially-distanced dispenser that lets them stomp a giant button.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Ouija Robot Is Even Creepier Than The Real Thing

October 2, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

When you’re a kid, nothing says spooky like turning off the lights and bringing out the Ouija board. For decades, this mystifying oracle has purported to channel the dead by spelling out messages using a board with numbers, letters, yes/no, and a heart-shaped windowed bit of plastic called a planchette.

While the action of a standard Ouija board owes itself to something called the ideomotor phenomenon, this motorized Ouija robot by [Ronald McCollum] is powered by tweets.

That’s right, the mannequin hand uses the planchette to spell out the tweets with a rather crisp snap of the wrist. [Ronald] impressively coded all the positions by hand, with each letter being comprised of both a hand position and planchette position.

This project utilizes both an Adafruit Crickit board and a Raspberry Pi, mostly because [Ronald] wanted to use the Crickit for something, and added the Pi to spell out the tweets on the display in real time. Check it out in action after the break, and stick around for a bonus video of the numbers being laser-cut.

Speaking of creepy motion, here’s a refrigerator clock that uses those colorful alphanumeric magnets.

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Dead E. Ruxpin Appears Alive And Well

September 26, 2023 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

What are you doing to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? Surely something, right? Well, Hackaday alum [CameronCoward] certainly has his holiday under control with Dead E. Ruxpin, a murderous, cassette tape-controlled animatronic bear.

Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt see the correlation to Teddy Ruxpin, an animatronic bear from the 1980s whose mouth moved as it read stories from cassette tapes. Cleverly, the engineers used one stereo channel for the story’s audio, and the other channel to control the bear’s mouth.

Dead E. Ruxpin takes this idea and expands it, using the same two channels to send audio and control three servo motors that move both arms and the mouth. How is this possible? By sending tones built from one or more frequencies.

Essentially, [Cameron] assigned a frequency to each movement: mouth open/closed, and left and/or right arm up or down. These are all, of course, synced up with specific points in the audio so Dead E. doesn’t just move randomly, he dances along with the music.

The bear is actually a hand puppet, which leaves room for a 3D-printed skeleton that holds the RP2040 and the servos and of course, moves the puppet’s parts. We can’t decide if we prefer the bulging bloodshot eyes, or think the cutesy original eyes would have made a scarier bear. Anyway, check out the build/demo video after the break to see it in action.

Are you now into Teddy Ruxpin? Here’s a bit more about those scare bears. And don’t forget, Halloween Hackfest runs now until October 31st.

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Spooky Noise Box Plays War Drums

September 20, 2023 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

What do you have cooked up to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? We humbly suggest adding in some type of noise box, especially one like this offering from [Paisley Computer] that uses reverb and other effects to achieve chilling, thrilling sounds.

As you can see, this instrument is essentially a bunch of doodads affixed to and through a cigar box. And as you’ll hear in the first video after the break, the various rubber bands make great drum sounds. The springs are nice, too, but our personal favorite has to be the head massager thing. Shhhing!

Inside the box you’ll find a guitar jack and some piezos glued to the underside of the top surface, but you’ll also find springs mounted across the inside that add to the resonance of the cigar box.

You can use either an interface and DAW or an effects pedal chain to really make things freaky, and [Paisley Computer] does a showdown between Focusrite interface versus various stomp pedals in the second video. In the third video, we learn how to make one of our own.

Do you like the idea of a spring reverb? How about a really big one that sounds sort of Satanic?

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Spooky Noise Box Has Post-Halloween Potential

September 5, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

There’s more than one way to scare people on Halloween. Sure, there’s always the low-brow jump scare, but that will generally just annoy the person and possibly cause a heart attack. No, what you need is a sustained soundscape of hellish audio. And where does one find hellish audio? Well, you make your own with a spooky-sounds noise box.

And no, we’re not talking about a soundboard that goes ‘boo’ and ‘ooo-OOO-oooh’ and whatnot. This is a full-on DIY instrument that has potential beyond Halloween. Essentially, the wooden box takes input vibrations from various doodads, and these vibrations are picked up by a piezo disk or two glued to the underside of the lid. The piezos are wired up to a 3.5 mm jack, which runs out to the PC and [SvartalfarQc]’s favorite Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). From there, it’s just a matter of playing around with the sounds — looping them, running them through various instrument voices, adding effects, and so on.

We love the the things that [SvartalfarQc] came up with, including a wind-up walking heart thing, a retractable badge holder, and that noise box mainstay, a sproingy doorstop.

We all know piezos are awesome, but have you ever considered that they can be used to digitize old wax cylinder recordings?

Realistic Animatronic Eyes Are An Easy DIY Build

February 15, 2023 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

It’s not Halloween yet, but if you’re planning a technically-complicated costume, it might serve you well to start building now. To that end, here’s a guide from [Ikkalebob] on how to produce a compact animatronic eye mechanism.

The eye is inspired by mechanisms used in professional animatronics. However, that doesn’t mean it’s hard to build. Complex machining is done away with in favor of readily reproducible 3D-printed components. The eyes are able to look in different directions and can move realistically, and the build includes working eyelids that have a great blinking action to them that feels very natural. An Arduino Uno is charged with running the eyes, paired with a bunch of hobby servos and an Adafruit PCA9685 servo driver. A hefty 5V, 4 amp power supply is on hand to deliver enough juice so the servos move smoothly without stuttering.

It’s the kind of thing that’s perfect for your spooky familiar, or installing eyes in the back of your head. It would be perfect to hide behind a window or in the bushes, too. Video after the break.

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