Making A Halloween Costume Fit For 2020

All across the country, parents are wondering what to do about the upcoming Trick Or Treat season. Measures such as social distancing, contact free treats, or simply doing it at home are all being weighed as a balance of fun and safety. [BuildXYZ] has decided to lean into the challenges this year and incorporate a mask as part of the costume for his boys.

It started with a 3d printed mask, printed in two halves, and sealed with silicon caulk and N95 filter material in the inlet and outlet holes on the sides. The real magic of the mask is the small OLED screen mounted to the front that works along with a small electret microphone inside the mask. By sampling the microphone and applying a rolling average, the Arduino Nano determines if the mouth drawn on the display should be open or closed. A small battery pack on a belt clip (with a button to flash “Trick or Treat” on the screen) powers the whole setup and can be easily hidden under a cape or costume.

This isn’t the first hack we’ve seen for Halloween this year, such as this socially distant candy slide. We have a feeling that there will be many more as the month rolls on and people start to apply their ingenuity to the season.

13 thoughts on “Making A Halloween Costume Fit For 2020

      1. I’m a big proponent of social distancing, but I don’t really see the problem with trick-or-treating. You’re social distancing more than you normally would, you’re wearing a mask that’s even more covering than the ones you normally wear, and the whole process is contactless!

        If there’s one holiday that is covid-friendly, it’s Halloween.

  1. Careful when you make your own mask that you don’t have a lot of air inside the mask.

    Exhaled air is very high in CO2 (40,000-50,000 ppm). The bigger the volume inside the mask, the more of that old air you inhale next time, and the higher the average inhaled CO2.

    Average breath volume in rest is only 500 ml, so mixing in 200 ml of exhaled air could result in average CO2 level of 16000 ppm, which could have negative physiological effects.

    If you want to make a voluminous mask, make sure you fill up the dead space inside the mask with foam or something like that.

    1. Well, the negative physiological effect is “getting out of breath and breathing harder”. If you have to choose a gas to breathe too much of CO2 is probably[1] the one to choose as that is the one that is directly detected by the ASICS.
      [1] I am not a physiologist

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