Halloween, one of our favorite holidays, is fast approaching. We’ve updated our Halloween Projects Archive once again to ensure that all of our Halloween projects are gathered together in one convenient location. If one of our projects inspires you to make something, we’d love to see the results in the flickr auxiliary.
The Great Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Halloween Project Archive!
Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and our collection of Halloween projects continues to grow. Every fall we update it to include our latest projects for the season. In the list that follows, we’ve organized dozens of our Halloween projects into categories: costumes, pumpkins, decor and food.
Last updated: 10/2019.
Continue reading Halloween Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
Well, almost— With a breath of new firmware, our Larson Scanner kit takes us on a trip to the late 1970’s.
In the old videos of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk performing their classic The Robots, a prominent prop is the animated LED necktie worn by each member of the band. If you haven’t seen this, or it’s been a while, you can see it right here at YouTube. (Additional viewing, if you’re so inclined: Die Roboter, the German version.)
The Kraftwerk tie has nine red LEDs in a vertical row, and one lights up after the one above it in a simple descending pattern. And what does it say to the world? One thing only, loud and clear: “We are the robots.” Now, if you’re anything like us, the most important question going through your head at this point is something along the lines of “why am I not wearing a tie like that right now?”
The good news is that it’s actually easy to make one. And the starting point? A circuit with nine red LEDs and just the right spacing: our open-source Larson Scanner kit. With minor modifications– a software change and dumping the heavy 2xAA battery pack–it makes a pretty awesome tie. In what follows, we’ll show you how to build your own, complete with video.
Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now three years old.
To celebrate, we’re rounding up our most interesting projects from this past year.
Quick projects and observations:
The monetary density of things
Contact Lens Case Small Parts Tray
Simple LED Projects:
Quick, easy, temporary, and beautiful LED garden lights
Food Hacking:
South Indian Restaurant Menu Decoder
Improved Custom Message Hearts
CandyFab
Papercraft
Electronics Projects
Interactive LED Dining Table Circuit
Dark detecting jack-o’-lantern
Kit Projects
Crafty Projects
Microcontroller Projects
Tennis for Two, a video game from 1958
Scariest Jack-o’-Lantern of 2008
Geek Design
(Whew!)
Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now two years of age. Collected below is a “Best of Evil Mad Scientist” for the past year: Some of our favorite projects that we’ve published over the last twelve months. Here’s to the next year!
Quick projects:
Rubberbands made from old bicycle innertubes.
Light tent made from a lampshade.
Spool spinner from an old fan.
The $1.00 C to D adapter
Electronics projects
How to make a Joule Thief from Make: Weekend Projects.
How to make a dark-detecting LED night light.
The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk
How to make a Sawed-off USB Key
AVR microcontroller projects
Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller
Kit Projects
Crafty Projects
Food Hacking
CandyFab
Printing complex shapes: Sugar Chain
Candyfab improvements: higher resolution and edible output
Papercraft:
Rotary Fraction Adding Machine
Observations & silly projects:
Lego Projects:
Forbidden Lego review & build
Reviews:
Lee Valley & Veritas Catalog Review
Teardowns:
This updated bat costume puts wing spreading at your fingertips where it belongs. It also boasts a more impressive and slightly more dangerous wingspan. Watch where you point your wingtips!
Continue reading Umbrella Bat Costume Update: Now more anatomically correct!
For halloween this year, we put together a “group” costume: a traveling exhibition of modern art. Each person wears a painting in the style of a modern artist.
One of the cool things about this costume is that it is a fully extensible and scalable design: it will look better the more artists that are represented. Having a real crowd would let you include some less well known artists, while still being recognized as a modern art exhibition.
Continue reading A Traveling Exhibition of Modern Art (the Halloween Costume)
This week the lab staff is heading off to Austin, Texas, our former stomping grounds and site of the other Maker Faire this year!
As we noted earlier, we’ll be doing a demonstration of how to build an excellent Bat Costume out of an umbrella and a hoodie. However, our primary project there will be our booth: High-Tech Pumpkins, where we will show up to a dozen (fingers crossed) halloween-themed projects, TSA willing. (Thank FSM it’s Austin, not Boston.)
While we get everything together this week, our publishing schedule will be a little wonky. However, halloween is just around the corner, so it’s time to dust off a few projects from our halloween archives!
How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween (Link)
Make a Flying Spaghetti Monster Costume (Link)
Crocodile Costume (Link)
Easy Itty-Bitty Blinky LED Jack-O’-Lantern (Link)
A Robotic Dalek Pumpkin (Link)
See also:
One year ago, Lenore wrote up her (remarkably popular) umbrella bat costume. If you didn’t build one last year, maybe you want to get started now for this year? In any case, she will be giving a demonstration of how to build it at the Maker Faire in Austin, TX, on October 20-21, 2007.
