Surely I’m not the only Halloween obsessed maker in here… What is everyone working on? I’ve got some big no-tech projects in progress but I need to inject FastLED into the holiday somehow.
Last year I made this 12 foot Reaper puppet with an infinity mirror “face”
Last year I made up some wearable panels for my son. Each panel was 6 LEDs wide by 12 high (72 LEDS per panel). A panel for each shin, each thigh, each forearm, each bicep, and a pair for the chest. Ran it off an Arduino Mega and a 12v 5A lipo battery. I was a little rushed last year, but got it finished, so now I’m trying to clean it up and make little improvements in time for this year.
Also HOPING to have my FastLED Christmas lights up in time for Halloween so I can run some orange and green lighting on the 31st. (In fact, my wife has stopped calling them “Christmas lights” and is going with “theme lighting” since she’ll want them for Valentine’s Day, Canada Day, St Patrick’s Day, etc).
Cool Reaper! How heavy was it?
I’ve had an on-going project with which I’ve never been completely satisfied… I’ve been attempting to replicate the “flickering fluorescent lighting” effect found in horror movies… The best guidance I’ve found online involves using a candelabra flicker bulb, photoresistor, and a modified dimmer circuit. The results are not convincing. Any suggestion would be appreciated!
@allanGEE not particularly heavy- maybe 30lbs- but the challenge is that it’s so tall and the greatest weight is the head- it’s attached to a baby hiking backpack frame to it just gives you an intense core workout- the hands were made from Polly plastic and ended up being pretty heavy too so I may change them out this year. One of the Lions is borrowing it this year for the town’s haunted train ride… Maybe I should draw up a release form haha
@Perry_Codes ooh you mean like the haunted hospital, industrial type flickering? With the buzzing? That would be really creepy. I saw some flickering Edison style bulbs at Home Depot that were neat but rather expensive. I’m going to try to get one on sale after the holiday and reverse engineer them.
That puppet is awesome! I’m just working on a couple of little FastLED jack-o-lanterns, and getting a head start on my wi-fi xmas tree. Will share if/when they’re finished. 
This year I’m making a giant toy robot costume out of foam board and Tin foil. I’m adding WS2812 strips all over the place, the face is actually a diffused grid of 2812s that will display “digital” faces and scroll text, hopefully, if i can get the code figured out. I’m also using am RPi and a 10 inch LCD in the chest to display video and some other things using Processing running on the Pi, It has speakers in the chest too connected to a 5 volt amp and I’m planning to run a voice controller program on the Pi. I had to come up with a really creative way to be able to see what in front of me with the face being a grid, I used mirrors that reflect down in to the body and out a wide slot across the chest. Its getting there, but i still need to finish making the arms, hands, legs and feet. everything else is pretty much complete except the arduino code for the face
@Jason_Coon the jack-lanterns were great! I’m totally stealing the code since I too have a million neopixel rings lying around. I just used a bunch for the haunted train ride on 4 plague Doctor masks worn by a bunch of Boy Scouts. I just wanted them to be spooky but by the end of the night they had ripped them off and we’re just screaming in the train riders faces. Not trusting my artistic vision to a bunch of freshman boy scouts next year
