It’s almost that time of year again! No chance to 3D print your Arduino®-powered pumpkin project? Didn’t get around to animating the LEDs on your costume? There’s still time, and here’s a half-dozen Hallowuino-themed projects to get you inspired.
Spooky, Sassy Pumpkin
You’ve heard of Spooky, Scary Skeletons, well here’s a Spooky, Sassy Pumpkin that is built to use a USB webcam to identify visitors as they approach, then answer their questions about what it sees using the Arduino App Lab Vision-Language Model (VLM) Brick. This jack-o’-lantern packs a whole lot more smarts than your average fruit thanks to the dual-brain VENTUNO™ Q concealed underneath it. All processing is designed to be handled offline, on-device without sending users’ faces and voices across networks or to the cloud.
Arduino-Powered Animatronic Supergroup
Bands break up for all kinds of reasons, so we were pleased to see Arduino Project Hub member nerdabilly figure out a way to sync the Costco Skeleton Punk Rocker animatronic with the Lowe’s Reaper Band. The band members are centered around a Bluetooth speaker, while the rocker is triggered by a timer or motion sensor. Not wanting to permanently alter these expensive displays, nerdabilly used the existing analog signal from the band leader to trigger the pink in place of its motion-sensing trigger, so the whole crew can rock out with their skulls out. Nerdabilly, we salute you for keeping this spooky symphony in sync!
Simple Spookiness with Modulinos and MP3s
Here’s some simple steps to sprinkle some spookiness into your season from our own team. Using the UNO™ R4-based Plug and Make Kit, plus a DFRobot DFPlayer MP3 player module, we show you how to trigger spooky lights and sounds when the Modulino® Distance sensor detects a presence. You can even connect to the Arduino Cloud to activate, customize, and monitor your project remotely. And that’s just the start – the seven included modules and built-in Wi-Fi give you plenty of options for creating your own frightful projects!
Ultrasonic Spider
Everyone has to start their Arduino journey somewhere, and for Project Hub member ParzivalUK, that place was a half-decade old project video demonstrating a fake spider dropping on unsuspecting passers-by. Unfortunately, ParzivalUK found that the accompanying code no longer worked for their project, and there weren’t detailed steps on how to recreate it. Driven by a desire to delight their son with a fun Halloween prank, ParzivalUK pushed on, combining a servo with an ultrasonic sensor to drop a toy spider on anyone who comes within approximately 40cm of the trap, with a continuous rotation servo to wind it back up, ready for the next victim!
Portal Sentry Turret
We love seeing projects shared on the unofficial Arduino Discord server. User jaysicks’ Aperture Science Sentry Turret costume really caught our eye, and we asked for a little more detail. The resulting Instructable is a detailed step-by-step guide for recreating the iconic tripod robot from one of the most beloved puzzle platformers of all time. With no 3D printer at hand, the costume relies on cardboard construction but comes out looking great. A red LED in the eye responds to the audio output from the incorporated GD380D-M audio playback module when a button is pressed, and the whole thing is controlled by an ATtiny85V microcontroller, programmed using the Arduino IDE. We think jaysicks’ son will be the envy of the neighborhood this Halloween, or at least among those with a solid appreciation of classic video games!
Cyber Research Systems T-1-7 Warrior Robot
The T-800 and T-1000 may get most of the screen time, but Redditor u/parsupo recreated the more niche T-1-7 Warrior Robot for their annual Halloween project. Built around an electric wheelchair base, the bot uses an Arduino Mega 2560 to receive and process commands from a remote control, and the same ATmega328 chips found in the UNO to control lights, gun movement, and the head. It may not be made of mimetic polyalloy, but we wouldn’t want to run into it in a dark alley!
What will you make?
Got a spooky Arduino-based project to share? Or need help realizing your creation? Head over to the Arduino subreddit and let us know!
