Tag Archives: diy

Halloween project round-up

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Headless horseman

Woo-hoo! We won the grand prize in the MAKE & CRAFT Halloween contest for our set of halloween projects!

    Just in case you missed them, here they are:

Apparently the world was ready for the invasion of Cylon Jack-o-lanterns— They made it onto TV, into magazines, and presumably onto a lot of front porches as well. Lots of people made their own and we’ve rounded up a list of some of the Cylon pumpkins (and umbrella-bat costumes) that we spotted this year. Read on to see where they showed up!
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Making Miniature Stuffed Pizzas in Springforms

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Stuffed pizzas are a Chicagoan delicacy consisting of layers of cheese and fillings above– and below– a thin pizza crust. One of the best ways to bake them is in a springform pan, so that the sides come out in perfect cylinders and come out easily. Taken to the small extreme, individual-sized stuffed pizzas are the ideal portable food to take to work for lunch. Made in miniature springform pans, they are compact, cute, tasty, filling, and are almost guaranteed to make your co-workers jealous. Read on and we’ll show you how to make your own springform stuffed pizza, in any size you like.

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Making Crafty Fridge Magnets

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Food comes in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and packages. Your kitchen cabinets, pantry drawers, and refrigerator shelves are already filled with marvelous little boxes and baggies of goodies. Some of these are cultural icons, others are silly modern wonders of neo-retro design.

You may even have your own little collection of interesting little containers in the form of left-over little boxes of candy from Halloween. What can you do with all these things?

Make them into an awesome array of fridge magnets!
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Easy Itty-Bitty Blinky LED Jack-O’-Lantern

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Halloween is tomorrow! Do you want to bring a carved pumpkin to work, but aren’t allowed to burn candles in your cubicle? Do you want to carve a mini-pumpkin that’s simply too small for a candle?

Or are you just running late and need to make a procrastinator’s pumpkin?

If you said yes to any of these questions, we just might have the solution that you’re looking for. Here’s an easy way to make a tiny blinking-LED jack-o’-lantern.

The blinking LED circuit is borrowed from a Tirefly, a commonly available type of motion-sensitive light that attaches to the valve stem on the wheel of a bike or car. Our quick modification (less than five minutes and no soldering) defeats the motion sensor so that the LED can blink all day (or all night) for you. (For hardened geeks who want to solder something anyway, we’ll also show you how to mod the circuit to use a higher-capacity battery.)

[Update: (10/2008) A reader wrote in that they have had trouble getting the circuit to blink continuously; the tirefly circuit may have been changed. (Confirmed– It has changed!) Do any other readers have recent success or failure to report?]
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Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern

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It’s a pumpkin! It’s a Jack-o-lantern! It’s an electronics project! It’s… a Cylon!

Cylons are great. They’re evil, menacing, and shiny. They have glowing red lights, computer-monotone voices, and they aim as precisely as imperial stormtroopers.

For halloween this year, we made Cylon Jack-o-lanterns in both large and small versions.

The design consists of two parts, a pumpkin-carving part and an electronics part. The big idea, of course, is to make the Cylon’s red eye scan back and forth.

How well does it work? Take a look! (Youtube)

This week’s Weekend Projects Podcast at Make Magazine is about making a programmable LED pumkin.

Our Cylon is made with a very different approach. It runs on a 9V battery and uses two cheap integrated circuits (a 555 and 4017) that together control six LEDs (or six groups of LEDs).

Circuits like this are quick, easy, and cheap to build. It’s also fun merely from the standpoint of making something that people might expect to require a microcontroller. For this particular circuit, it turns out to be cheaper and faster to do it without one.

If you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can build this circuit for less than ten dollars, in less than two hours, without any programming at all.
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How to Build a Better Bat Costume

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Halloween is coming right up, so it is time to post one of our favorite costumes to help get everyone in the spirit. This is a darned good looking bat costume you can make from a hoodie and an umbrella.

Yes, similar costumes have been made before. Even Martha‘s done it. However, our version is better.
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How to make hard drive PCB picture frames

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So, you’ve disassembled hard drives, taken the magnets out, made wind chimes out of the platters, and so on. One thing that you might have left over is a set of printed circuit boards. Funny shaped printed circuit boards, with holes in them. Here’s how to turn those leftover PCBs into fabulous geek-chic picture frames.
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How to paint things using stickers as stencils

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You’ve got something that just looks boring. Maybe it’s too plain, or has been defaced by ugly corporate logos. You want to jazz it up, and you want it to be permanent. Here’s an easy way to make a fabulous multicolor paint job using stickers to mask your layers.
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