Electronic Demon Costume Is Surprisingly Unnerving

October 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

[Phil] over at Adafruit crashed last Sunday’s Show and Tell with an amazing demon costume that includes a voice changer and animated LED matrices for The Eyes and mouth. He just posted how he built this costume, but you’ve really got to Watch the video to see how awesome this build is.

Every demon needs a scary voice, so [Phil] repurposed his Arduino-based voice changer for this build. By being able to adjust the pitch of the demon’s voice with the turn of a knob, [Phil] goes from growling from the pits of hell to a demon with just a slightly annoying voice.

The Eyes make use of the Adafruit I2C LED matrix backpack. The eyes are wired to the same I2C address to prevent derping, but the three red mouth LED matrices are capable of displaying anything that fits on an 8×24 LED matrix.

The electronic portion of this build is mounted to a piece of plexiglas, which is in turn mounted to a mask [Phil] picked up from a craft store. Not really the best option considering the Halloween stores are now open for the year, but it does its job.

A Morphsuit – a spandex bodysuit – completes the build along with a few demon wings and horns. During Adafruit’s Show and Tell, [Phil] had electronic parts scattered all over his desk. To turn this into a costume, he’ll be mounting a small battery-powered speaker in a chest piece and stuffing all the electronics in a fanny pack.

It’s a very, very cool build that really steps up the game for Arduino-powered costumes. Check out the video after the break.

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Halloween Light Show Gets An Upgrade

October 22, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 6 Comments

This is [Dave]’s second year of putting on a Halloween light show (cache), and his latest production has received some upgrades over last year’s Christmas show. He’s switched from Christmas style bulb lights to high brightness LEDs, and upgraded to 48 channels of control.

The controllers are from Light-O-Rama, and each provides 16 output channels. They communicate over RS-485; the same type of network used for controlling professional theater lights with the DMX512 protocol. The whole thing is powered by a 20 A DC supply from some Chinese retailer.

[Dave]’s show features light up pumpkins, tombstones, and faces mounted on his house. The lights are coordinated to a list of songs that he plays over an FM transmitter, allowing for cars to tune into the music that’s synced up with the lights.

If you happen to be in Estacada, OR, you might want to head over to [Dave]’s and check out the show in person. Otherwise, there’s two videos of the light show after the break.

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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.