While it is sort of disturbing, it is one of the best uses for a round LCD we’ve seen lately. What is it? Just [vishalsoniindia]’s SoulCage — a pendant that appears to have a poor soul trapped inside of it. Just in time for the upcoming spooky holiday. You can see the device in operation in the short video below.
The heart (sorry, unintentional pun) of the device is an ESP32-S3 round display. That means the rest of it is software, a battery, and a 3D printed case. There’s a switch, too, to select a male or female image as well as shut the device off when not in use.
He starts by demonstrating the vending process: a backlit vend button is pressed, an animation plays on the screen as a synthetic voice speaks through attached speakers, the vending mechanism rotates until a successful vend is detected with a photoelectric sensor (a photoresistor and an LED) or a timeout of 10 seconds is reached (the timeout is particularly important for cases when the stock of prizes is fully depleted).
For a successful vend the prize will roll out a vending tube and through some ramps, visible via a perspex side panel, into the receptacle, as the spooky voice announces the vend. It’s the photoelectric sensor which triggers the mask to speak.
As is tradition, we’ve reserved 100 tickets priced at $148 (plus fees) for what we like to call the True-Believers. Those are the folks that are willing to sign up even without knowing who will be speaking or what this year’s badge looks like. Once those are sold out, the regular admission tickets will cost $296 (plus fees). We might be slightly biased, but even at full price, we like to think Supercon is a screaming deal.
Those who join us in Pasadena, California from October 31st through November 2nd can look forward to a weekend of talks, workshops, demos, and badge hacking. But what’s more, you’ll experience the unique sense of camaraderie that’s produced when you pack hundreds of hardware hackers into an alleyway and ply them with as much caffeine as they can handle. Some treat it like a normal hacker con, others as a social experiment, but nobody thinks of it as anything less than a fantastic time.
We’re still working closely with our friends at Supplyframe, DigiKey, and Framework to put together a full itinerary for Supercon 2025, so stay tuned over the coming weeks as things are finalized. But in the meantime, we’ve got a couple new additions this year that we’re pretty excited about.
Carving pumpkins by hand is hot, sweaty, messy work, and a great way to slice your way into a critical artery. Why not let a water jet do it for you? It’ll be cleaner and more precise to boot, and [Jo_Journey] is here to show us how.
So sharp!
Obviously, you’ll need a water jet machine, there’s no getting around that. You’ll also still have to do the basic preparation of the pumpkin yourself—cutting a porthole into the top and mucking it out is your job. With that done, you must then mount the pumpkin on two metal rods which will be used to mount it in the water jet machine’s working area.
You can then create a vector file of your design, and use your chosen software to generate the G-code to run the water jet. [Jo_Journey] uses Scribe, and recommends cutting at a speed of around 200 in/min at low pressure. Remember, it’s pumpkin you’re cutting, not high-strength steel.
There is some inaccuracy, of course—your pumpkin’s surface is not a flat plane, after all—but the results are good enough for most Halloween-related purposes. Even despite the geometrical issues, though, [Jo_Journey] shows us that you can get pleasantly sharp edges on your design. That’s very hard to achieve by hand!
We do love a good holiday hack around these parts, even if it’s out of season. If you’ve been cooking up your own pumpkinous plans, don’t hesitate to let us know! Earlier is sometimes better—after all, who has time to hack together a project if you’ve just read about it on October 29?
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!
[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.
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!
