Alexa Controls This Savage Pumpkin

January 18, 2020 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Traditionally, pumpkins are carved during the holiday of Halloween to represent malicious and frightening beasts. Flying in the face of this is [minihannah]’s carving of Adam Savage, which she’s calling a hero pumpkin. It’s a fun twist on the custom, and of course, it’s packing WiFi too.

The build starts with a carving of the typical orange winter squash cultivar, using artwork cribbed from the cover of Mr. Savage’s biography. Inside, there’s a bunch of LEDs, all under the control of an adafruit feather M0, which talks to the broader internet over WiFi. The pumpkin can be controlled by Alexa, thanks to the combination of Adafruit.IO and IFTTT.

It’s a fun little Internet of Things build, and one that’s ready for the modern smarthome, where you’re already used to yelling at the lights to switch off. We’d love to see a similar Billy Corgan build, if only for the pun. If you give it a go, be sure to drop us a line. Video after the break.

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Check Your Halloween Candy For Malicious Payloads

October 28, 2019 by Lewin Day 31 Comments

There’s long been much handwringing around Halloween around the prospect of pins, needles and razor blades being hidden in candy and passed out to children. On the very rare occasion this does happen, the outcome is normally little more than some superficial cuts. However, for 2019, [MG] has developed an altogether different surreptitious payload to be delivered to trick or treaters.

Consisting of a small USB device named DemonSeed, it’s a HID attack gadget in the genre of the BadUSB devices we’ve seen previously. When plugged in, the unit emulates a USB keyboard and can be programmed to enter whatever keystrokes are necessary to take over the machine or exfiltrate data. Files are available on Github for those looking to replicate the device.

The trick here is in the delivery. [MG] has produced a large quantity of these small devices, packaging them in anti-static wrappers. The wrappers contain a note instructing children to insert them into their parent’s work computers to access “game codes”, and to share them with their friends while hiding them from adults.

The idea of children brazenly plugging hostile USB devices into important computers is enough to make any IT manager’s head spin, though we suspect [MG] doesn’t actually intend to deploy these devices in anger. It serves as a great warning about the potential danger of such an attack, however. Stay sharp, and keep your office door locked this October 31st!

Pneumatic Zombie Will Blow Away Trick-or-Treaters

October 20, 2019 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

What are you doing for Halloween this year? Just gonna set the candy bowl out on the porch and call it good? That’s a risky one, ’cause if one group of mischievous preteens cleans you out, you might get TP’d by the next one. Best to keep Halloween a tad on the scary side and keep those ghouls in line. Candy is a privilege, not a right.

Halloween is a big deal in [trimbandit]’s little burg, and he builds a new attraction for the front yard every year. This year, it’s the dawn of the dead — a fresh zombie rising jerkily from the grave to say hello, world. He moves left, he moves right, he writhes and wrestles, wedged between worlds.

His life force comes from a pneumatic system designed for props. The cylinders connect to a controller with built-in relays that makes programming frightfully easy. Then it was just a matter of adding a foam head, skinning it with a scary mask, and fitting him for a suit from Goodwill. Drag yourself and your candy bucket past the break for a fun-size demo video and a couple of bonus goodies.

We bet [trimbandit] is already wondering how to step up his game for next year. He seems to have conquered the ground, so why not take to the skies for fright and delight?

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A Useless Tomb Of Eternal Doom

October 1, 2019 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

It’s officially October, and that means we can start unleashing the Halloween hacks. Take for example this restless skeleton that master automaton maker [Greg Zumwalt] has doomed to spend eternity inside of a useless box. If that wasn’t enough to wake the dead, every time some joker pushes the button, these blinky lights come on. Hey, at least there’s no opera music.

The ironic thing about useless machines is that there are a ton of ways to make them. This spooktacular Halloween-themed do-nothing box doesn’t use a microcontroller, or even a 555 — it’s purely electromechanical. When the button is pressed, two AAAs power a small gear motor that simultaneously lifts the lid, raises the dead, and twists him a quarter turn so he can close the lid and put himself back to eternal rest.

The intricately-printed skeleton doesn’t really push the button — he’s far too dead and frail for that. The gear motor also turns a dual-lobe cam that activates a pair of roller switches that handle the candles and lower Mr. Bones back into his crypt. Clear as blood? Skitter past the break for a closer look at the mechanism.

Halloween or not, we love a good useless machine around these parts. Here’s one that incorporates a real candle and who could forget this octo-switched beast?

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Old CDs Create A Haunting Rainbow Vortex

July 10, 2019 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

The 1960s were, in Western culture, a time of great social and political upheaval, and the dawning of the psychedelia subculture. This resulted in an art style consisting of bright colours in wild, shifting designs. [Afraser-kruck] has built a device capable of generating beautiful rainbow light patterns, which he calls Mesmer-Eyes.

The device uses two CDs, stripped of their reflective coating. This leaves the plastic layer behind, which appears to be acting as a circular diffraction grating. By passing light from a flashlight through a CD, a dazzling rainbow vortex is created, and the effect is even further improved by adding a second disc. The patterns can be moved and shifted by changing the distance between the discs themselves, as well as the flashlight. This is achieved through the use of a sled that slides on PVC pipes, holding each individual element.

It’s a build of a kind we haven’t seen before, and is put to good use as a creepy Halloween decoration, imitating the famous Cheshire Cat. It’s one we can’t wait to tackle ourselves, and we wonder how difficult it would be to turn it into a projection, or a larger scale design.

Creepy eyes remain a Halloween staple; we’ve featured them before. Video after the break.

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It’s Never Too Early To Prepare For Halloween: With Flamethrowers

May 10, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

Using a legitimate flamethrower is on the bucket list for a lot of us. Even Elon Musk got into the action with his Not-A-Flamethrower flamethrower. For the rest of us non-billionaires though, we have to come up with clever reasons to build our own like “Halloween is only six months away”. [HandsomeRyan] took this approach six months ago to great effect, and recently released the files on Thingiverse for us all to enjoy.

The cover for building this project was making a Jack-o-Lantern shoot flames out of its face on-demand. The build is based around a car door locking solenoid, which has plenty of kick for applications like this. [HandsomeRyan] upgraded his old wood design with fancy 3D-printed parts which, with the help of the solenoid, deliver a blast of flammable material across a candle inside the Jack-o-Lantern via an aerosol can hidden in the pumpkin.

Part of the elegance of this project is that a car door locking solenoid is typically controlled by remote, meaning that if you want this to be remote-controlled the work has already been done for you. If you need a more timely excuse for building one of these, the Fourth of July is a little bit closer, which should work in a pinch as an excuse to build something crazy even if you’re not American.

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