Propeller Halloween Contest Winners

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkUSjf0U-GU]

Meet Skelly, the propeller powered singing skeleton, winning entry to the Unofficial Propeller Halloween Contest. Sick of the massive amounts of Arduino projects floating around the web, [Oldbitcollector] offered a halloween challenge.  Make something spooky using a propeller and other parallax stuff, win a prize. Skelly, made by [Chuck Rice] was the star of the show, so [Chuck] will be getting some USB development boards in the mail.

6 thoughts on “Propeller Halloween Contest Winners

  1. I hate to be the one to naysay, but there wasn’t anything that required an MCU in that skeleton. A spinny motor and a cam would have done all of that, just like the store bought animated stuff.

  2. perry, That is somewhat true, but we only had 2 weeks. All the propeller is doing in this case is driving the servo. But the nice thing about using the propeller is that I can keep half a dozen of the propeller boards on hand and slap them into
    use quickly for a project. Most of the software is in available as “canned routines” and I can just select the ones I need, add a few components, and go. Next thing I want to add is a scanning range finder, so that the skull can be positioned to look back and forth between the two roe three closest bodies. I then want to add code to trigger on specific frequencies. The jaw does this with a black box at the moment, but I am not happy with the volcal triggering. So, I plan to allocate a cog and some additional hardware to trigger the jaw motor. Then I can allocate a third cog to listen for a different frequency and cause the hand to strum the guitar. A fourth cog and listen for the base beat and tap a foot. I have coded for PICs and AVRs and BS2 and others. For me, the spin/propeller combination just work out better for the things I like to do.

  3. mem.namefix, you may be right. It was just a hack. Maybe not hack-a-day quality. I did not even know it was going to be submitted to Hack-a-Day.

    I would like to see the fishing line solutions. Can you send me some good examples?

    The problem with building animatronics is that they have to work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the month of October, year after year. The fishing line solutions have to be repaired daily.

    Skelly was designed to run during parties and works unattended to whatever music you play, all night long.

    This is my second try. The first was here: http://www.wildrice.com/Halloween/Construction/Skeleton/ which I did years ago. The problem there was that the servos kept stripping the gears (even metal gears). And that skeleton was very light weight (it weighed less than a pound) where the one I used this year is over 20 pounds.

    It is not as easy as it looks.

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