Pneumatic Zombie Will Blow Away Trick-or-Treaters

What are you doing for Halloween this year? Just gonna set the candy bowl out on the porch and call it good? That’s a risky one, ’cause if one group of mischievous preteens cleans you out, you might get TP’d by the next one. Best to keep Halloween a tad on the scary side and keep those ghouls in line. Candy is a privilege, not a right.

Halloween is a big deal in [trimbandit]’s little burg, and he builds a new attraction for the front yard every year. This year, it’s the dawn of the dead — a fresh zombie rising jerkily from the grave to say hello, world. He moves left, he moves right, he writhes and wrestles, wedged between worlds.

His life force comes from a pneumatic system designed for props. The cylinders connect to a controller with built-in relays that makes programming frightfully easy. Then it was just a matter of adding a foam head, skinning it with a scary mask, and fitting him for a suit from Goodwill. Drag yourself and your candy bucket past the break for a fun-size demo video and a couple of bonus goodies.

We bet [trimbandit] is already wondering how to step up his game for next year. He seems to have conquered the ground, so why not take to the skies for fright and delight?

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Giving Life To An Undead Baby Doll

If carving a pumpkin this month is too passé for you, take a shot at [Jason Suter’s] instructable and build an animatronic legless zombie child that will surely creep out anyone who has a fear of dolls or other vacant-faced toy babies.

Beginning with a sacrificial doll, [Jason] dismembers all of the limbs and head from the torso in order to make room for the robotic upgrades. The servo motors which animate the new wooden dowel bones are mounted to a chassis cut with a CNC machine. [Jason’s] instructions include some nice diagrams demonstrating how the points of articulation at the shoulders and elbows work in conjunction to produce different flavors of crawling and dragging.

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To top it off, the head is attached to its own mounting plate with tendons that rock back and forth in a miserable undead sort-of fashion. As an added nicety, he explains how to install a bluetooth module into the circuitry so he can tweak and upload his example code to the Arduino brain remotely without needing to get his hands near it. There is of course some additional melting, painting, and doll torture required to achieve that rough-up undead look… but that’s all just icing on top of a well executed piece of animatronics.

In his video [Jason] gives us an overview of his zombie’s build and also shows it in action:

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