Singing Pumpkins

October 15, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

This Halloween table will sing a sweet serenade to spook your guests. Each of the animatronic pumpkins were quite easy to build, but you may end up spending a bit more time choreographing the performance.

Inside each Jack-o-lantern you’ll find a custom Arduino compatible board called a Minion board. These include a wireless connection which lets the system sync with the computer playing the audio. The pumpkins are fake, which means that can be reused year after year (unlike our LED matrix inside a real pumpkin). The mouth is connected to a servo with a short piece of bent wire, allowing it to flap along with the words of a song. You can see a performance of the Ghostbusters theme in the clip after the break.

A custom GUI was written in C# to aid in the choreography. It handles the playback of the song, with a few buttons that can be used to record the light and mouth effects. This ‘recording’ is then used to drive the pumpkins during a performance.

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Arduino Voice Changer Turns You Into [Vader]

October 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Halloween is just around the corner, so of course we’re looking forward to a bunch of awesome costumes put together by Hackaday readers. In an effort to match his voice to his costume, [Phil Burgess] over at Adafruit (and former Hackaday alumnus) put together an Arduino-powered voice changer to give his voice the gravitas of [James Earl Jones] or the lightheartedness of a member of the Lollipop Guild.

If you’ve ever played with a turntable, you’ll know playing a 33 RPM record at 45 or 78 RPM turns your treasured copy of Dark Side of the Moon into a lighthearted aural experience with a pitch that is much too high. Likewise, playing a single at 33 or 16 RPM means those once dulcet tones are now recordings of tormented souls in an acoustic hell.

[Phil]’s voice changer operates on the same principle by recording sounds from a microphone into a circular array and playing them back at a different rate; faster if the desired effect is a Munchkin, and slower if this year’s Halloween costume will be a Sith lord.

The completed build incorporates a 10k pot to dynamically change the timbre of the voice changer, as well as an Adafruit Wave Shield to play back a few pre-recorded sounds of lightsabers clashing. In all, a very cool project for your Halloween costume that’s also a very good introduction to DSP and real-time audio modifications with a microcontroller.

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Dinosaur Hoodie To Remind You Halloween Approaches!!

September 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

[Tom’s] dinosaur hoodie would make a bang up Halloween costume. It’s a glowing version of the bony plates you’d find on a Stegosaurus. Not only does it look great at night, you should be able to put one together or yourself in an afternoon.

He used a laser cutter to make the translucent fins, but it would not be hard to cut them all out by hand. Each piece is two sides of the plate connected by a narrow rectangle which leaves room inside for an RGB module. These are chained together and controlled by an Arduino (most likely using SPI or I2C, we’re not sure which), then sewn on the back of a hoodie.

Update: [Matt] made a derivative of this design. The plates are pointy like a stegosaurus.

Send in those Halloween projects

Which reminds us… Halloween quickly approaches and we haven’t seen the usual onslaught of awesome. We love this time of year because of the ingenuity that comes out to play in the costumes, yard decor, and scare tactics being prepared for the big night. Please send a link to your project and we’ll start pumping out the holiday features.

To get you thinking, here’s a set of folding wings used in a costume, and a possessed powerwheels to chase down the little ones. Don’t sit on your hands, we want to hear about every project!

Tron Costume Fits Nice And Snug

May 17, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

We’ve seen our fair share of Tron costumes and props, but much like [Sean-h] points out, they are usually pretty bulky and baggy. He’s gone a slightly different route by starting with a wetsuit instead of bulkier items like leather jackets. The lighting is done in the same manner we’ve seen before, copious amounts of EL wire and EL tape. The additional layers of this costume were made from foam, so they could be fairly form fitting as well.

[Sean-h] points out that there are some downfalls to his design. The wetsuit, while looking great, gets pretty hot while indoors and the foam layers have a tendency to detach if you move around too much. We think it looks great though. Good job [Sean-H]

Forget Tupac, Check Out This Front Yard “hologram”

April 17, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

Yep, the story is everywhere right now. Tupac performed at Coachella from beyond the grave in the form of a “hologram”. Most of you probably recognize what is going on pretty quickly though. This is the same Pepper’s Ghost trick we’ve seen several times already in concert performances from various virtual bands like the Gorillaz.

While reading this article explaining Pepper’s Ghost to the masses, we saw that they had found a true gem of a hack! [Kevin] was inspired by a trip to disney’s haunted mansion back in 2007. He came home and went to work building his own really cool back yard attraction that happened to include the same trick they are now using for imaginary performers. There are tons of pictures of the build and some nice notes along the way covering 2 years of operation and upgrades. It is an ancient trick, but we always love seeing a good build.

A Head-mounted Tesla Coil – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

November 18, 2011 by Mike Nathan 26 Comments

We can hear the commercial now…

“Reeeeeeal men of geniuuuuuuus! Here’s to you Mr. no-fear, singing Tesla coil on your hat wearing guy…”

Call him a genius or call him crazy – all we know is that [Tyler’s] Tesla coil hat is awesome! Even though it’s the middle of November, we couldn’t pass up this Halloween costume.

[Tyler’s] creation essentially boiled down to taking a standard dual resonant solid state Tesla coil and shrinking it down to a reasonable size for mounting on his skull. The mini Tesla features a pretty compact boost core which worked reasonably well, at least for a little while. He says that the boost never truly worked properly and needs a redesign, which is something he’ll tackle when he gets some free time.

Boost issues or not, we think that the video below speaks for itself. The hat is certainly an attention getter, and we think it’s great – even if wearing a Tesla coil on your head is not necessarily the safest thing to do.

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Candy Chucker – Weapon, Or Advanced Halloween Delivery System?

November 9, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Now we know why kids in this neighborhood wear plastic Halloween masks instead of just painting their faces. They’re trying to protect themselves from the onslaught of hard candy spewing out the front of this candy chucking pumpkin.

The mechanism operates very much like a baseball or football throwing device. Now that we think of it, it’s also the same concept as the chicken launcher. There is a feed shoot that drops the projectile into the grips of two spinning chuckers. Those chuckers are built out of a couple of fans, with layers of fabric to account for different sizes and shapes of candy.

The video after the break shows some test firing. We love the sickening ‘whap!’ that the Werther’s Original (or whatever crappy Halloween offering they’re using) makes when it slams into the wall of the room.

This thing’s just begging to be mounted on a parade float, don’t you think?

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