Halloween Project

Darren Wright

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Springfield, Missouri
My wife and I have thrown an annual Halloween party for the past 5 years or so. We've borrowed a friends animatronics each year. This year we've decided to increase the spookiness. I found a paint ball sentry project that I thought might work well for an interactive animatronic. It uses a webcam to pickup motion and track movement. Today I built the turret, which I'll mount a mask on. For the fire button I'll wire in some LED's to light up the eyes of the mask. It has a list of mp3's that will be updated to sound snips from various movies.

Here's a test run of the turret as I moved a pencil in and out of the view of the webcam...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjdQOSIkocM
 
Friend of mine used to have (still does for all I know) a home built robotic spider name Igor. It used an old vacuum cleaner to inflate a bag, which supported a platform which housed a video camera and speaker. He would set it up for halloween, and the kids would have to talk to Igor, as well as a 'talking' Mailbox nearby, the mailbox had a mic and speaker in it as well, and we would do a 'crew' thing... couple of people running the spider & speaking for it and another on the 'mailbox', all operated from his living room.
 
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