halloween

190 Articles

Functional Etch A Sketch Costume

November 9, 2008 by 5 Comments

etchasketch

We love all of the creative Halloween costumes that have started trickling in now that the holiday is finally over, and people have found time to document their last minute projects. Take this functional Etch A Sketch costume made by [mazinbenny]. The knobs are lawnmower wheels. The pulley system is strung with 1/16″ wire rope to move a carrier for a dry erase marker. The marker draws directly on an acrylic screen. HowStuffWorks has a post on how a real aluminum powder based Etch A Sketch works.

We’ve covered more technical Etch A Sketch projects in the past. We’ve seen them hooked up to computer mice, drawing portraits at Maker Faire, and commenters have even suggested turning mechanical dry erase boards into giant Etch A Sketches.

Propeller Halloween Contest Winners

November 3, 2008 by 6 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkUSjf0U-GU]

Meet Skelly, the propeller powered singing skeleton, winning entry to the Unofficial Propeller Halloween Contest. Sick of the massive amounts of Arduino projects floating around the web, [Oldbitcollector] offered a halloween challenge.  Make something spooky using a propeller and other parallax stuff, win a prize. Skelly, made by [Chuck Rice] was the star of the show, so [Chuck] will be getting some USB development boards in the mail.

Hack-o’-lantern

November 2, 2008 by 6 Comments

[Todd] sent in his Hack-o’-lantern just a bit late for Halloween. He did a good job of working with the logo considering the difficulty it poses for pumpkin carving.  We would have been proud to have that on our porch for the kids to steal and smash in the road. Since others in the past have also done Hack a Day pumpkins, maybe this will spawn a Hack a Day pumpkin carving contest next year. If he had enough time to get the green LED working, it would have been that much sweeter; everything is better with electronics.

A Very Power Suit Halloween

November 1, 2008 by 12 Comments


We spent our Halloween dressed as an irate traveler as we flew cross country, but it looks like a lot of people were having much more fun. [flaming_pele!]’s Aliens power loader is one of the best costumes we’ve seen yet. He built it by referencing a 1/12th model kit and a lot of photos. The final costume is about 80% full size which gets it under their 8 foot ceilings. There’s a video of the suit embedded below. Our love of power suits was documented fairly well in our roundup post this summer. Make found two other related costumes: a Star Wars AT-ST and a generic mech constructed from packing foam. Did any of you dress as something truly nerdy for Halloween? Continue reading “A Very Power Suit Halloween” →

Flickering LED Circuit

October 30, 2008 by 16 Comments

Here’s a simple project for your Halloween celebration. The other day while looking through our box of Halloween decorations, we noticed that the incandescent lamp in one of the jack-o’-lanterns was burnt out. Instead of simply replacing the outdated bulb, we decided to build a small dark detecting circuit with 2 yellow LEDs based on this Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories design. After successfully building the circuit, we took the project one step further by incorporating an Atmel ATtiny13 microcontroller. The code switches the LEDs on and off randomly for a flickering effect and is based on this instructable. Below is the schematic we created in EAGLE and a parts list.

Continue reading “Flickering LED Circuit” →

Animated LED Eyes For Halloween

October 3, 2008 by 5 Comments

[Matt Daughtrey] sent us this sweet little project he’s doing for Halloween. He’s building some animated LED eyes. He says that the whole thing is 3 individual LMDriver platforms, another project he’s working on. There isn’t any info available about that, but he does expand a little. He states that each display module uses an Atmega169 with some heavy multiplexing.  The eyes really don’t look that impressive sitting on the bench, but watch the video to see how cool they really are.

We noticed that the back of the boards appear to have http://www.embeddedether.net on them.  Unfortunately that site seems to have been grabbed by a domain squatter.