Flaming Power Wheels Skeleton Wins Halloween

When the project description starts with the sentence “I use an RC remote and receiver, an esp32, high-current motor drivers, servos, an FPV camera, and a little propane”, you know that this is one which deserves a second look. And so [gearscodeandfire]’s Halloween project caught our eye. It’s a pink Power Wheels jeep driven by a skeletal rider, and the best part is that the whole thing is remote controlled down to a pan-and-tilt skull, a first-person video feed, and even real flames.

At its heart is an ESP32 with a set of motor controllers and relays to do the heavy lifting. The controller is a standard radio remote controller, and the first-person view is an analogue feed as you’d find on a drone. The skeleton is given a child-like appearance by discarding the original adult-proportioned plastic skull and replacing it with a much larger item. The thought that plastic Halloween skulls are available in a range of standard sizes and can be considered as a part in their own right is something we find amusing. The propane burner is supplied from a small cylinder via a solenoid valve, and ignited with the spark from a high-voltage transformer.

The result, we think, wins Halloween hands down. Twelve-foot skeletons are SO 2023!

The video is below the break.

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Make Your Own Remy The Rat This Halloween

[Christina Ernst] executed a fantastic idea just in time for Halloween: her very own Remy the rat (from the 2007 film Ratatouille). Just like in the film Remy perches on her head and appears to guide her movements by pulling on hair as though operating a marionette. It’s a great effect, and we love the hard headband used to anchor everything, which also offers a handy way to route the necessary wires.

Behind Remy are hidden two sub-micro servos, one for each arm. [Christina] simply ties locks of her hair to Remy’s hands, and lets the servos do the rest. Part of what makes the effect work so well is that Remy is eye-catching, and the relatively small movements of Remy’s hands are magnified and made more visible in the process of moving the locks of hair.

Originally Remy’s movements were random, but [Christina] added an MPU6050 accelerometer board to measure vertical movements of her own arm. She uses that sensor data to make Remy’s motions reflect her own. The MPU6050 is economical and easy to work with, readily available on breakout boards from countless overseas sellers, and we’ve seen it show up in all kinds of projects such as this tiny DIY drone and self-balancing cube.

Want to make your own Remy, or put your own spin on the idea? The 3D models and code are all on GitHub and if you want to see more of it in action, [Christina] posts videos of her work on TikTok and Instagram.

[via CBC]

Start Your Creepy Jack-O-Lantern Project Early This Year With Gourdan

For a lot of us, projects take time, and they have to be squeezed in around the regular chores of real life. Thus, if you’re starting your Halloween builds after the holiday displays have already hit the stores, you’re probably too late. We’re here to implore you to start building early this year—and you can take inspiration from a great pumpkin called Gourdan.

Gourdan is the work of [Braden Sunwold]. It’s a pumpkin with a fearsome visage and creepy eyes that follow you around the room. This is achieved thanks to a Raspberry Pi 3 nestled within Gourdan’s gourdy body. Gourdan’s eyes are a pair of 1.54-inch LCDs which display animated eyes. Thus, no mechanical wizardry is required here—it’s all done digitally. A camera attached to the Raspberry Pi tracks people with the aid of OpenCV, and the eyes are created and animated with the help of Adafruit example code.

There’s never a better time to start hacking for Halloween than right now. And hey, who knows—your neighbour might have kicked off in January, so they’ll have an almighty head start. They could have something really impressive in the works!

And don’t forget—you can always send us your holiday hacks, whatever the time of year! Just hit up the tipsline. Happy making!

The Ghost Detector 9000 Is A Fun Spirit-Chasing Game

Halloween may have come and gone for another year, but we’re still finding neat spooky projects lurking out on the Interwebs. Case in point, the Ghost Detector 9000 from [Jules].

Effectively, what you’re looking at here is a fun interactive ghost-detecting game. It consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero hooked up with an IMU sensor that can detect the rig’s movement and orientation. As the user moves the Ghost Detector 9000 around, it outputs lights and sound when it’s aimed at a so-called “ghost-signal”. The user then pulls the trigger to “capture” the ghost. The whole rig is built inside a flashlight which presented a useful form factor for modification.

For those eager to dive into the nitty-gritty, [Jules] has shared the project files on GitHub. There’s some nifty stuff going on, like Rust code that interfaces with I2C devices hooked up to the Pi, and a sensor-fusion algorithm to make the most out of the data from the 9-axis IMU.

It’s a fun build that probably taught [Jules] a great deal along the way, even if it’s a game at heart. If you prefer to shoot zombies instead of capture ghosts, we’ve seen a build that lets you go hunting with a laser crossbow, too.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Meet Creepsy, The Robotic People-Seeking Ghost

The 2023 Halloween Contest might be over, but we saw some great entries and clever modifications bringing projects into the Halloween spirit. One of them is Creepsy by [Hazal Mestci], a Raspberry Pi-based robotic ghost able to autonomously pick people out of a crowd and glide towards them, emitting eerie sounds as it does so.

The tech behind Creepsy (GitHub repository) originally led the somewhat less spooky existence of a mobile drink serving platform. But with a little bit of modification and the addition of a bedsheet with cutouts for sensors, the transformation into an obstacle-avoiding people-seeking spooker was complete. Key to this transformation was the Viam Python SDK, a software Swiss army knife used by robot builders everywhere. Creepsy itself was built using handy aluminum extrusion, and 3D printed parts along with the requisite suite of motors, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2023 Halloween Contest. Got an idea for next year? It’s never too early to get started because ideas are great, but nothing beats “done on time”!

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Spooky Noise Maker Is Self-Contained

We just love it when y’all build off of each other’s projects. This spooky Halloween noise maker from [C.M. Herron] is no exception. But while the projects we’ve seen lately rely on external computers and/or guitar pedals to create the effects part of the build, this one has everything running on a Raspberry Pi that sits inside the box.

Readers of a certain vintage will recognize this as an 8-track storage box, on top of which are several noise-making objects that creak and ting and reverberate nicely. A USB microphone picks up the sounds, and by using a regular microphone instead of a piezo, [C.M.] can introduce varying levels of feedback to make the sounds even spookier.

So, how did [C.M.] make this work on a Pi 4? To put it simply, they’ve got the Reaper DAW and Windows Valhalla plugins running on top of WINE, which running on top of Box64, which is running on top of the Bullseye Pi OS. [C.M.] sure learned a lot from this build, and hopes to inspire others to build their own spooky noise boxen. Plus, they’ve already thought of ways to improve it for next year. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.

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Building Penny’s Computer Watch From Inspector Gadget

When you help your bumbling Uncle Gadget with all kinds of missions, you definitely need a watch that can do it all. Penny’s video watch from Inspector Gadget has a ton of features including video communication with Brain and Chief Quimby, a laser, a magnet, a flashlight, a sonar signal, and much more.

To round out her Penny costume, [Becky Stern] has created a 3D printed version of Penny’s incredibly smart watch. It listens for Penny’s iconic phrase — come in, Brain! — and then loads a new picture of Brain on the rounded rectangle TFT display. Inside the watch is an Arduino Nicla Voice, which has to be one of the tinier machine learning-capable boards out there.

[Becky] created the watch case in Tinkercad and modified a watch band from Printables to fit her wrist. With such a small enclosure to work with, [Becky] ended up using that really flexible 30 AWG silicone-jacketed wire for all the fiddly connections between the Arduino and the screen.

After getting it all wired up to test, she found that the screen was broken, either from pressing it into the enclosure, or having a too-close encounter with a helping hands. Let that be a lesson to you, and check out the build video after the break.

More interested in Uncle Gadget’s goodies? Check out these go-go-Gadget shoes and this propeller backpack for skiers.

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