Simple Solar Circuits:
How to get started adding solar power to your small electronics projects. Use the sun to power small solar and battery powered night lights, garden lights, and decorations for halloween.
Continue reading Simple Solar Circuits
You can make these simple LED ghosties (based on LED throwies) from a soda bottle, a couple of LEDs and batteries, string, and a scrap of fabric. Hang them in your trees, your haunted house, or in your porch for Halloween. They look especially excellent because the eyes seem to float in mid-air behind the fabric.
Continue reading LED Ghosties for Halloween
Here’s an inexpensive electronic circuit that you can build to put in your Jack-o’lantern. It provides power to drive a few LEDs at night, and automatically turns them off during the daytime. It’s a simple and automatic dark-detecting circuit that you can use to for your very own photosensitive pumpkin.
Continue reading A dark detecting circuit for your jack-o’-lantern
Insalata caprese, an Italian classic, becomes an instant halloween classic as well.
The traditional ingredients for this delicate salad are fresh mozzarella, basil, plum tomatoes and olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Our version goes only slightly further, adding a thin slice of olive as the garnish. And, a clever trick produces perfectly round pupils every time.
Continue reading High Cuisine for Halloween: Eyeball Caprese
After more than a year of painstaking directed research by our Experimental Foods Division, we have finally achieved one of our most important longstanding goals: the production of edible googly eyes. Like many other great inventions, it seems almost simple in retrospect, but in this write up we walk through the process and show you how to make your own.
Continue reading One Hundred Percent EDIBLE Googly Eyes!
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)
The Snap-O-Lantern is a robotic mini-pumpkin. Normally, it just sits there, in disguise as a boring old pumpkin. But, every twenty seconds he comes to life. His LED eyes turn on, his jaw slowly opens, and then SNAPS shut– and he goes back into stealth mode.
What’s inside? A small hobby servo motor, driven by an AVR microcontroller. This is a minimal microcontroller project, and is very straightforward if you happen to already have a setup for programming one. We’ll walk through the carving, setup, programming, and electronics. This is an open-source project, one of the world’s first “gpl-o-lanterns”; source code is provided.
A quick, low-tech halloween project: we hollowed out a couple of miniature decorative gourds. You can get these by the bagful at the grocery store, next to the mini-pumpkins. The one on the left had a kind of wrinkly base that adapted itself well to this shape, and the one on the right had more of a conical tip that we cut off to make a flat base.
Gourds like these have a hard shell, about 3 mm thick, that is rather hard to cut through. We used a loose drill bit (turned by hand) to make the initial cut. From there, a regular hobby knife (e.g., x-acto) works well. Once the soft flesh and seeds are scooped out, the hard shell can dry to make a semi-permanent display.
It’s unreasonably fun to walk around with one of these in each hand, reenacting the age-old chase drama. Especially when the little yellow dude chomps a big white dot. Now who’s chasing who?!?!
You can find more pumpkin projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
The MiniPOVs were created by AdaFruit Industries. They Rebelled. They Evolved.
And now, they may be invading your front porch.
It’s an open secret that here at evilmadscientist we go both ways: analog and digital.
So, here is yet another way to get a Cylon pumpkin circuit– a useful component for halloween. (Yes, you can do KITT too, we won’t stop you.) We’ll spare you the carved pumpkins and dive right into the details.
There seem to be a lot of MiniPOV kits out there. If you’ve got one, this is a fast way to make a passable slowly-scanning eye.
Note that we are not using the “POV” part of the MiniPOV– you don’t need to wave your pumpkin back and forth; it really is just a slowly-moving image.
(You can get a MiniPOV direct from Adafruit or from the Make store, probably in time for the big day.)
This is a one minute project for some of you (you know who you are), but if you are really starting from scratch there isn’t any giant time advantage to going doing it this way instead of analog.
Once you have a working minipov, the first step is to download the firmware (4 kB .ZIP file) and unzip it. If you are programming the MiniPOV3 directly through its serial port,
pop open a terminal and move to the directory. Type (with a return after each line):
make all
make program
And… that’s it.
(If you have a GUI for programming AVRs and know how to use it, you can of course use that instead of programming through the terminal.)
If you are using some other AVR programmer or are programming a bare ATtiny2313 without a MiniPOV at all, you will need to edit the header of the included makefile to reflect the type of AVR programmer and the port where it is located. (And then, proceed with the instructions above.)
While this makes a pretty good looking pumpkin, there is still room for improvement in the firmware– the motion is reasonably smooth but doesn’t yet capture the incandescent fade that the analog versions do. I’ll leave it to the community to improve this firmware; if you have some better code, let me know and I’ll help roll it in.
Update:
Tim Charron sent in a greatly improved version of this program– please give it a try.
You can find more pumpkin related projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
