Woody who is a controls electrician has a cool hobby! He builds custom animatronic Halloween props. Have a look at his latest creation, the Halloween Animatronic Winged Demon. The controller that is being used is a Allen Bradley SLC 5/04 which is out of reach for most Halloween prop makers but since he is in the business I am sure some of this equipment was acquired through customer upgrades. You can see a few more pictures of the prop here. Like most other things, if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing!

If you are looking for a way to convert a regular room into a scary Halloween room have a look at this UV LED Illuminated Halloween Skull Room idea. Flashing UV LEDs are used to illuminate skulls that have been painted on black fabric walls. If that wasn’t enough camouflaged people were in there scaring the guests!

This is an entry in the Hacked Gadgets Show us your Halloween Project Contest, there is still time for you to enter the contest by showing us how you add to the Halloween fun.

"I used flashing LED kits and wired up 3 banks of 8 UV LEDs to all flash together. "

BobS has come up with a creative Hard Drive Camera Stabilizer. We have seen other ways to Gyro Stabilize a Camera but this one is nice because it has the possibility of making use of a hard drive that otherwise would have no purpose.

"In an experiment, I connected a loose HD to a computer power supply, and felt the resistance to its change of position. I figured a HD in the horizontal and one in the vertical plane (X- and Y- axis) would dampen almost all unwanted shaking. A single Gyro has its theoretical limits. A strong Gyro in the front / back plane (Z – axis) could dampen shaking, but would not correct rotation. But if rotation around the optical axis is only a minor component of motion blur… , the advantage is less weight and power requirement."

Back in 1959 this is what you would have been reading if your were an electronics professional. How things have changed from then to now, almost everything you purchase today is made to be disposable since you can produce a new board for less than it would take to troubleshoot and repair it. It is impressive how reliability has changed though since in this article they expect most people to spend at least 40 dollars per year on service calls to repair the TV, at only 5 dollars per service call this means that your TV is expected to break down every month and a half!

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Joe from ProtoDojo has made a NES USB Drive with Security out of his old NES controller. Instead of simply hacking the device with a USB drive he wanted to use the controller buttons to add some extra security to the device. When the device is plugged into the computer nothing happens until you enter in the Konami code. When the code is entered in correctly a relay pulls in and applies power to the internal USB drive allowing it to be seen by the computer.

Via: Hack A Day

"It’s fairly straight forward. The arduino constantly polls the controller for button states. When you push a button, it stores that value in an array which always holds the most recent 10 values. Whenever you push the start button, it checks the stored array against a separate array which contains the values for the konami code."

Retro Gamer Drive (Konami Code NES Controller Flash Drive) from ProtoDojo on Vimeo.

Todd Harrison came up with a great way to scare anyone who dares to press the red button nose of his pumpkin. The Honking Pumpkin is sure to be a hit sitting on the front step of your house.

"Control board showing the two 555 timers, two MOSFETs, pot to control horn blast timing and other discrete elements. The first 555 timer starts when the red button is pushed and it turns on the red 12v bulbs through the 1st MOSFET (P10NK60ZFP). After 1 second this timer stops and cascades a pulse to the 2nd 555 timer which repeats the process turning on the horns through the 2nd MOSFET and relay."

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Bumblebeepee from the Hacked Gadgets Forum entered the Halloween Project Contest with this cool Hidden Sound Trigger contraption. He used an infrared beam to detect when someone enters the target area, the buzzer output of the beam module presses play on an mp3 player which is amplified to drive some speakers and scare someone. This year he is working with the same module to play some music and light up a pumpkin when someone walks up. Halloween is sure to be a fun time in that yard!