Halloween Hood Has Hideous LED Gaze

October 8, 2015 by Richard Baguley 12 Comments

Looking to create fear and dread with your Halloween costume? [Becky Stern] over at Adafruit has you covered, with her tutorial on building a mystical hood with LED eyes, perfect for your next Jawa, Black Mage, or Orko costume.

This creepy-looking creation is based around a Gemma controller driving two NeoPixel Jewels, small circular RGB LED boards. The Gemma drives the boards to slowly fade on and off for the required creepy eye effect, but it would be easy to create other lighting patterns.

Speaking of patterns, the tutorial also includes a sewing pattern for the hood, and plans for a 3D printed battery holder that would make the whole thing very easy to carry. If the eyes aren’t enough, how about adding an LED magic staff to complete your creepy ensemble? Or perhaps some light-up dinosaur spiky plates?

Do you have any good Halloween costume hack plans? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll put together a list of the best closer to the hideous day.

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Hand Cranking The Malevolent Mechanical Pumpkin

October 6, 2015 by Richard Baguley 2 Comments

Meet Marty. He’s a pumpkin that has been fitted out with a moving eyes, tongue and an expression of malevolent glee. You would probably assume that this is all driven by servos, right? Nope: Marty is driven by an old-fashioned crank mechanism, designed and built by [Ben Brandt].

He wanted to make something that could be driven by a hand crank. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from throwing a motor on the back to drive the mechanism, but [Ben] wanted the internals to be fireproof so he could light it with a candle. His mechanism, built from old bits of wire and sheet metal, is not flammable or adversely affected by heat like a motor and power supply would be. He succeeded admirably, and he has also done an excellent job of documenting the process to providing handy tips on creating a mechanical pumpkin-based monstrosity.

Those hackers down with a little electronic wet work you should start building their LED-integrated Jack-O-Lantern now. These things take a lot of time turn out.

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DIY Conveyor Gets You From Here To There

December 27, 2014 by Rich Bremer 4 Comments

[gwfong] was in a bind. He had to make a unique Halloween prop that dispensed candy to young trick-or-treaters at a Haunted House. He decided on a conveyor belt system and besides being functional, it also had to be inexpensive to make. After poking around the hardware store [gwfong] had an idea: make it out of items he can re-use after Halloween!

As you can see, the main roller system is made of paint rollers. These are cheap and certainly re-useable after the conveyor is disassembled. Luckily for the project, the handle of the paint roller just happens to fit very snugly into a 3/4″ PVC pipe fitting. Four T-fittings and some short lengths of PVC pipe were purchased and are used to mount the paint rollers to a wooden base. A piece of canvas cut to length and sewed into a continuous loop makes up the conveyor belt. A loose belt certainly won’t deliver any candy so two turnbuckles, one at each end, keep the belt tight on the rollers.

There is a DC motor that spins a pulley which is coupled, via a standard rubber band, to one of the end paint rollers. A full-speed conveyor haphazardly flinging candy around wouldn’t work out to well so an Arduino and motor shield are used to control the conveyor’s speed and duration. A 7.4 5000mAh Li-Po battery provides the necessary electricity for a nights-worth of un-tethered candy dispensing.

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"Stomach Shot" lets you see through your zombie corpse.

“Stomach Shot” Halloween Costume

November 11, 2014 by Marsh 12 Comments

Halloween may have come and gone, but [Luis] sent us this build that you’ll want to check out. An avid Walking Dead fan, he put in some serious effort to an otherwise simple bloody t-shirt and created this see-through “stomach shot” gunshot wound.

The project uses a Raspi running the Pi Camera script to feed video from a webcam on the back of his costume to a 7″ screen on the front. [Luis] attached the screen to a GoPro chest harness—they look a bit like suspenders—to keep it centered, then built up a layer of latex around the display to hide the hard edges and make it more wound-like. Power comes from a 7.4V hobby Lipo battery plugged into a 5V voltage converter.

After ripping a small hole in the back of his t-shirt for the webcam and a large hole in the front for the screen, [Luis] applied the necessary liberal amount of fake blood to finish this clever shotgun blast effect.

The Tale Of Two Wearable Game Boys

November 3, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

We’re well past the time when Halloween costume submissions stop hitting the tip line, but like ever year we’re expecting a few to trickle in until at least Thanksgiving. Remember, kids: documentation is the worst part of any project.

[Troy] sent us a link to his wearable Game Boy costume. It’s exactly what you think it is: an old-school brick Game Boy that [Troy] wore around to a few parties last weekend. This one has a twist, though. There’s a laptop in there, making this Game Boy playable.

The build started off as a large cardboard box [Troy] covered with a scaled-up image of everyone’s favorite use of AA batteries. The D-pad and buttons were printed out at a local hackerspace, secured to a piece of plywood, and connected to an Arduino Due. The screen, in all its green and black glory, was taken from an old netbook. It was a widescreen display, but with a bezel around the display the only way to tell it’s not original is from the backlight.

Loaded up with Pokemon Blue, the large-scale Game Boy works like it should, enthralling guests at wherever [Troy] ended up last Friday. It also looks like a rather quick build, and something we could easily put together when we remember it next October 30th.

[Troy] wasn’t the only person with this idea. A few hours before he sent in a link to his wearable Game Boy costume, [Shawn] sent in his completely unrelated but extremely similar project. It’s a wearable brick Game Boy, a bit bigger, playing Tetris instead of Pokemon.

[Shawn]’s build uses a cardboard box overlaid with a printout of a scaled-up Game Boy. Again, a laptop serves as the emulator and screen, input is handled by a ‘duino clone, and the buttons are slightly similar, but made out of cardboard.

Both are brilliant builds, adding a huge Game Boy to next year’s list of possible Halloween costume ideas. Videos of both below.

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Hackaday Links: November 2, 2014

November 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

Russians blowing up capacitors! As we all know, electronics only work because of blue smoke. [kreosan] is releasing this blue smoke from a few hundred caps. Fun times, even if they are a large number of inert tube shields in their collection of caps.

[mayhugh1] over on the home model engine machinist forum has built an 18 cylinder radial engine. It’s based on the Hodgson 9-cylinder radial engine that has been around for a while. The crank case is machined from a 5″ diameter rod of aluminum. There’s a Picassa album of the engine being constructed as well.

[Richard] wanted a Minecraft server, but not just any Minecraft server; this one demanded a custom case. A grass block was the inspiration, acrylic the medium, and a quad-core Mini-ITX the guts of the project.

Halloween was last Friday, and as always the tip line filled up with costume builds. [Leif] built a Ghostbusters costume complete with Muon trap, [Jeff] printed out some ~~steampunk~~ post-apocolyptic goggles, and [Green Gentleman] made a death-a-corn, although we’re struggling to figure out why the last one isn’t called an acorn-‘o-lantern.

[Matthias Wandel], a.k.a. the woodgears.ca dude, is well-known in certain circles for being a wizard of wood. One of the first projects that put him on the map was a pantorouter – a router to cut mortises and tenons. He’s going back to his roots and building a bigger version. This version uses models of routers that are available outside North America, and in the latest video [Matthias] has it dialed in very well.

The Open Source Remote Control was an entry for The Hackaday Prize that didn’t make the final cut. It’s now an indiegogo project, and has some really cool tech we can’t wait to see in mainstream RC transmitters.

Halloween Hack Night At Pololu

October 31, 2014 by Sarah Petkus No comments

Have some servos and an Arduino lying around? It isn’t too late to get your freaky on! Last night, tech enthusiasts of Las Vegas gathered at Pololu Robotics to show off their hacks for a Halloween flavored edition of their bi-monthly robot club. These projects created by those in the community as well as the Pololu engineers themselves are fun and have a relatively short list of materials. So, if the examples below give you some inspiration, this is permission to Macgyver something together before your big Halloween party tonight…

Impatient Severed Fingers – [Amanda] came up with a cute use for some mini servos and a zombie hand prop. The five severed fingers were attached to one end of a plastic rod. The other end was mounted to each of five servos which were laid out in the appropriate hand shape and attached to a fixed base. An Arduino running a basic sweep sketch animated the motors at slightly staggered intervals, creating a nice rolling effect. Even with the moving parts exposed this prop would be awesome to have on display, or set the ambiance with its continuous tapping…

Angry Spectral Delta – [Nathan Bryant] made an actual costume for his delta robot from Robot Army. By attaching a small plastic skull to the end effector and draping a tattered piece of fabric over the rest of the mechanism he effectively transformed the delta into a little ghost with a sassy personality. The head swiftly bobbed about, all while staying parallel to the table… until it intermittently came unhinged and hung limply, which was a nice added effect!

Robotic Exorcism Baby – This doll could turn its half skeleton, half baby face 180 degrees and then laugh at your fear. By attaching two servo motors together, [Jeremy] was able to create a pan and tilt mechanism which acted as the baby’s contorting neck and chattering jaw. The micro controller sending commands to the motors was hidden modestly under her dress.

Stabby Animated Cardboard Shadowbox – Among the animatronic devices seen at the event was a shadowbox made by [Brandon] hidden in a dark conference room nearby. When one happened to walk past the seemingly unoccupied space, they’d glimpse the silhouette of an arm stabbing downward with a knife through a windowsill. Being lured in for further investigation you’d find that the shadow was being cast by some colored LEDs through a charmingly simple device. A cutout made from recycled card stock was attached to a single servo. This whole mechanism itself rocked back and forth slightly as the motor moved, which wasn’t intentional but added some realism to the motion of the stabby arm.

There were many interesting projects present last night ranging from remote-controlled skeletal arms to other reactive devices ready to deliver a scare. If you’re interested in knowing more, those made by the Pololu crew are documented on their blog. Since video does these projects better justice, you can check out a compilation of clips here:

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