Singing House Lights Up Halloween Again This Year

October 25, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

[KJ92508] is flooding the neighborhood with light again this year. Everyone knows of that one house in town that really goes all out, but few put on a show anything like this one. The four Jack-o’-lantern faces lead the way with the opening sequence from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Each has at least four different mouth poses, and two eye orientations which are surprisingly well synchronized with the audio. The image above shows mostly orange lighting, but the home is outfitted with addressable RGB LEDs for a full color performance. In fact, it has seen an upgrade this year, increasing the channels by eight-fold to 1144! Don’t miss the performance which we’ve embedded after the break.

We had considered not featuring this, since we looked in on the same home last year. But the number of tips that rolled in made us think that a lot of you missed it, or are just delighted by the multitude of blinky lights. Either way, it’s worth the four minutes out of your day– it will either put a smile on your face, or make you glad not to live across the street from this guy.

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Halloween Hacks: Death Throws A Party

October 25, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

If you him the Grim Reaper, Azrail, Magere Hein, or simply, ‘Death,’ he sure throws a good party. [Victor] has an anatomical model of a skeleton at his job named [Hein], and for his birthday party, his coworkers decided to throw [Hein] a party.

[Victor]’s first skeleton-based build was last summer. The twinkle of the summer sun in [Hein]’s eye socket made for a great occasion to dress the skeleton up in some summer garb. [Hein] was dressed in a fashionable Hawaiian shirt and put in a window along a corridor. Of course, a skeleton is no good if there’s no element of surprise, so [Hein] held disposable camera that flashed every time someone walked by.

[Hein]’s birthday spectacular required something a bit more shocking. A blowout whistle was added to [Hein]’s mandible. With a PIR sensor and a TI Launchpad, [Hein] was commanded to blow the whistle every time someone walked by.

[Victor]’s builds may not have the shock value – or even be as scary as Halloween necessitates – but he’s got a few good ideas for what could become a great yard display. Check out the video after the break to see [Hein] greeting [Victor]’s coworkers.

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Halloween Hacks: Diorama-rama

October 20, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

The folks down at LVL1, the Louisville hackerspace, are throwing a Halloween party. To showcase his building skills, LVL1 member [JAC_101] put together a Halloween diorama featuring the inner workings of Doctor Frankenstein’s laboratory.

There’s a bunch of really neat pieces that make this build great. First up is the LVL1 plasma sign. This sign is four circuits pumping a high voltage charge through Xenon flash tubes. Instead of a bright flash, a very Halloweeny Xenon plasma shoots though the tubes. The sign is constructed from four disposable camera flash circuits.

A few flickering-LED torches light Dr. Franenstein’s lair while the monster is a McDonalds happy meal toy wrapped in surgical tape and painted with UV reactive paint.

In the interests of repurposing existing materials, a plasma disc belt buckle was taken from ~~[Seven of Nine]’s regeneration chamber~~ LVL1’s rave supply cabinet and provides a suitable ‘mad scientist’ aesthetic. A bit of EL wire was thrown in for good measure along with some black lights to activate the UV paint.

While Frankenstein’s lab is missing a hilariously oversize knife switch on the wall, [JAC_101] still pulled off a great build.

Halloween Hacks: Scaring Small Children With Huffman Coding

October 19, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

The team over at NerdKits decided they needed to do something for Halloween. Only on Halloween is scaring small children is an admirable goal, so they demoed a way to play creepy sounds after a door has been opened.

To trigger the sound, a magnetic reed switch from an alarm system is attached to a front door. This triggers the microcontroller and with a bit of delay, some creepy audio can be played on a pair of speakers. The team decided to store all the audio data on the flash memory of their ATmega328p, but that wouldn’t allow for a very long scream. To extend the length of the wails of the damned, the NerdKits team decided to use Huffman coded audio.

Because Huffman coding relies on the most common value being assigned the shortest code, the team used a bit of Python and C magic to figure out the optimal encoding for their audio file. After the evil laugh was sufficiently compressed, the microcontroller was programmed to decode the audio and send it to a pair of speakers. The team made all the software for their project available here for your perusal.

Although this project could be thrown together in an hour with an Arduino and an MP3 shield, the NerdKits team wants to get kids to learn how things work, also an admirable goal. [Humberto] from NerdKits put a video up explaining the theory of the project. Check it out after the break.

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Halloween Props: Pumpkin Battery

October 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

This one would make a nice centerpiece for your Halloween party. It’s a battery with tiny pumpkins serving as the cells. [EM Daniels] shows us how to clear out the pumpkins, fill them with some freshly mixed electrolyte, and he even throws in the directions for baking the pumpkin seeds.

Each pumpkin will need a pair of conductors made of dissimilar metals to serve as the anode and cathode. Copper wire is used for one, aluminum for the other, and both wires have a spiral pattern bent on one end to increase the surface area that contacts the electrolytic solution. Now just boil up a slurry of vinegar, gelatin, and salt, then let it sit in the fridge over night. [EM Daniels] was able get 1.5V out of this project (enough to light one LED) for two hours, and 1.4V for six hours by using seven of the pumpkin cells in series.

[Thanks Karen]

Halloween Hacks: Transform That Annoying Dancing Santa Into A Halloween Mummy!

October 17, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

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If you have one of those annoying dancing (Santa/Elvis/Frankenstein) decorations sitting around collecting dust, you could always repurpose it like [mischka] did. He originally wanted to enter our Santa-Pede challenge and purchased a dancing Santa, but time eventually got the best of him. With no other use for it in mind, he decided to make his dancing Christmas toy into a fun Halloween decoration.

An electronic rendition of “Jingle Bells” isn’t exactly the scariest thing around, so he dismantled the dancing toy and started fiddling with the sound board. A few well placed resistors later, his circuit-bent Santa Claus started to sound like he had five too many egg nogs, which was perfect for the dancing mummy [mischka] had in mind.

He transplanted some LEDs from Santa’s base into his head, and masked it off with some electrical tape so that only the eyes were visible. He then wrapped the mummy in the requisite bloodied bandages and set him out for the kids to enjoy.

Since it’s hard to find someone who genuinely likes these dancing toys, we think this is a great way to make them useful again. If you’ve got a few of these things kicking around, we suggest reenacting the dance routine from Thriller using an army of Santa-zombies and sending a video our way.

Continue reading to see a video of [mischka’s] mummy in action.

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Halloween Hacks: A Haunted House Project For The Kids

October 15, 2011 by Mike Nathan No comments

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If the kids have been bugging you to get started with your Halloween decorating, [Dale] from BasicMicro has a neat and interactive project that’s sure to satiate their thirst for ghoulish fun.

His wife was looking for some new decorations for this Halloween, so he took a quick trip to the craft store and found a DIY foam Haunted House kit. After convincing her to do the assembly, he outfitted the display with some Starlite RGB modules, which have all sorts of interesting lighting modes built in. When the lights are turned low, the house jumps to life, as you can see in the video below.

The construction and wiring are not an overly complex job, so it’s a great starting point for little minds and hands that are beginning to develop an interest in electronics. For those kids with a little bit of experience under their belts, the house could easily be modified to use servos to create swinging doors and shaking grave stones.

The limit is truly defined only by their imagination (and your electronics budget), so why not give it a try this weekend? We’d love to see what you and your budding hackers put together!

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