Neat Homebrew Halloween Tech?

aibrahim asks: "I just saw a proton pack (alternate site) a friend has built. It made me wonder what other neat high tech things the Slashdot crowd might be brewing up for the coming holidays. What I am really after is stuff that one of you made, better yet would be diagrams or explanations of how you made it. Doesn't have to be a costume item, anything interesting that fits the season would do." This is a follow-up to the earlier article. So what are you dressing up as for Halloween, and how do you plan on making your costume interesting?

Comments

Cheap projects to entertain the neighborhood...

[stefanlasiewski]

I don't really care about people's costumes. I want to know more about your Halloween _projects_. What cheap, creative ways are you using to decorate your house?

Here's an easy way to haunt up your front porch for less then $25. The neighborhood kids love it.

Last halloween I bought 10 pounds of dry ice from a local industrial chemical supply store for about $10. I placed the dry ice in a cheap black 5 gallon "witches cauldron", which I got from the local Haloween store.

To create the fog, I simply placed the ice in the cauldron, and periodically added warm water when I saw trick-or-treaters. The warm water melts the ice, and you get fog.

The dry-ice provided enough fog rolling down my front steps to freak out the neighborhood kids. This fog lasted approximately 4 hours.

For added effect, I placed a couple of those green and red glow sticks inside the cauldron (Since glow sticks glow less when cold, I placed the sticks on a pedestal above the cold ice and water), and added some reflective alluminum foil to enhance the glow.

As an added effect, I replaced my porch light with a black light, and added a bunch of those green-spiderwebs from the halloween store.

This gave the whole porch a nice eerie glow, especially with the green-glow eminating from the cauldron. The fog trickling down the stairs is a great and cheap effect, especially with flickering candle light from the jack-o-lanterns.

Whole cost of this operation, including dry ice $1 a pound), cauldron ($5 at the drug store), black light ($2 at hardware store), glow sticks ($2 each), spiderwebs ($3 a pack), pumpkins ($3 each) was probably $25. I'm going to do the same thing this year.

Great list of homebrew halloween projects

[stefanlasiewski]

There's a whole homebrew Halloween subculture out there.

Here's a great Halloween Project List with diagrams and everything.

Some of the projects cheap, easy and can be done in an hour (and you still have a few days left).

Other projects are more involved, like building a IR motion detector to detect trick-or-treaters and set off some effect (like a fog machine) further up the path, the famous flying crank ghost projects, glowing ghosts, you name it. I mean, come on, haven't you always wanted to build your own electric arc (jacobs ladder)" that you see in Frankenstein's Labratory???