PJMonty from SoCalHalloween sure knows how to rig up some great animatronics! The bird and talking skull are funny and spooky at the same time! This project was entered in the Halloween Project Contest, which by the way there is still time to enter.

Via: HG Forum

"The electronics consist of two custom circuit boards I designed. The bottom one (most of which is obscured) contains the micro-controller and memory. It talks to the host PC via a serial port and has animation moves streamed to it on the fly. The top board has another micro-controller and is responsible for handling the time critical work of controlling the actual RC servos. It also has some interface circuitry on it for things like the LCD. Partially visible on the right is the power supply which powers both the circuitry and the servos."

SoCalHalloween - "Small Candy" from SoCalHalloween on Vimeo.

Piezoelectric elements can be used to make sound or detect sound. Steve Hoefer has made a Knock Lock, which is a device that can listen to knocks on the door. If the sequence of knocks is the same as the recorded knock sequence it unlocks the deadbolt on the door. Steve was the guy who also made the Dice Reading Machine.

Via: Zedomax

"While working on another project I ran across the Arduino knock sensor tutorial. Sensing a single knock is a great little project for learning about microcontrollers, but what about sensing specific knocks? Seeeeecret knocks? And if we could detect a secret knock, shouldn’t it unlock a door? If you can’t tell by looking this was cobbled together from spare stuff around the lab, it’s not much more than a piezo speaker, a tiny gear reduction motor, and an Arduino. And PVC pipe."

Swiss designer Matthias Pugin has made a crazy clock called Switchital which is a Moving 7 Segment Digital Wall Clock that works by moving hidden magnets which arrange bars of 7 segment displays. At first I thought this was a design simulation but I think it’s real! I would like to have a look at the guts inside the clock and the controller that is an amazing choreographer.

EDIT: Matthias just got back to me. It’s currently a concept but a prototype is in the works. I can’t wait to see how the internals are configured when it is built.

Via: Gadzetomania

Mr Fixit Rick has been hard at work building a machine that demons from the afterlife can talk through. It makes for a great Halloween centerpiece. Well maybe it doesn’t exactly channel demons but it is still lots of fun. If you want to have lots of spooky fun you can even build your own! There is still time to enter your Halloween Project into the Contest.

Via: Hacked Gadgegts Forum (Halloween Project Contest)

"This simple crystal radio shows abilities such as: detecting lightning, making voice phenomena, interacting with all forms of light, creating music and sound effects, reading a computer screen, acting as a mike, and detecting RF pulses. In that order!"

I remember playing with my Lite Brite when I was young. What looks better than sticking solid plastic pegs into fixed holes in a grid of plastic? The answer is the beautiful glow of individual LEDs soldered into a perf board! There is of course some added complexity that comes with that choice. These days I am answering lots of questions on LED applications from our LED customers, what resistance should be used, what voltage should be used, what is the ideal current for a certain application, what series parallel combination should be used, etc. A LED resistor calculator helps but is still not super simple for all end users. That’s what makes these Hi-Tec Sketch Art products shine! All you do is pick up an LED with the desired color and stick it in the special pad. Keep sticking LEDs in the pad until your design is done. 

The model pictured above is the Hi-Tec Sketch Art model.

Here is my latest creation, it’s a Gear Clock. It consists of a bunch of wooden gears, a PIC microcontroller and a stepper motor. The heart of the clock is a PIC 16f628A microcontroller. This microcontroller has an internal oscillator however an external 20MHz crystal oscillator is being used since it will have to accurately keep track of time for weeks and months. The microcontroller is interfaced to two buttons and one motor.

The gear arrangement is as follows:

• 9 tooth motor gear
• 72 tooth minute gear with a 24 tooth secondary
• 72 tooth intermediate gear with a 18 tooth secondary
• 72 tooth hour gear

To achieve the correct timing the 9 tooth motor gear is advanced 4 steps every 9 seconds. By moving 4 steps at a time the motor routines can be simple since the motor is always at rest with the same coil energized.

Read more about the gear clock here.

Bob Davis has made another can crusher with a huge 5 thousand volt power supply eBay score. A 100uF capacitor doesn’t sound that big, heck I have ones that are 10 times that size in a tray right beside me as I type this. Well the big difference is the one that is beside me has a voltage rating of 50 volts. That is a far cry from the 5000 volt rating that the one in this power supply! We have featured a bunch of Bob’s can crushers here in the past but I think that this is the biggest and baddest one so far!