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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?
Get yourself a green t-shirt, a grey sweatshirt, some Robitussin and go as Ellen Feiss.
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.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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???
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
For controlled environments (i.e., haunted houses) the head-on-a-platter gimmick is hard to beat for great reactions from the kids (and some parents!)
Basically, you get a thin aluminum serving platter, the throwaway kind, and cut a neck-sized hole in the center (tape the edge with transparent tape to avoid cuts). Cut one slit from outer edge to the hole. You can easily bend the platter open to put it on someone, then fold it back flat and tape up the slit.
Then get a board and cut a square notch into one of the long sides, about the middle. Put the board across some sawhorses. The person with the platter sits comfortably in a chair below table level, with the platter appearing to rest on the table. Throw a tablecloth over the whole thing and arrange eyeballs, worms, or whatever on the table.
If you're the head, keep your eyes closed until someone is nearby and speculating about whether you're real or not. Then pop open your eyes wide and scream as if just noticing you have no body.
When we did this one year, we picked up a ton of candy off the floor from kids who didn't stop to check what they'd lost! evil laugh