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.

Dave Jones from the EEVblog did a review of the PICkit 3 Programmer/Debugger. Watch the video above but to sum it up he was not impressed with the new version. The video below is a video that Microchip made in response to Dave’s video review. Lets just say that I am VERY impressed by Microchip putting together this great video poking fun at themselves and on such short notice. Well done Microchip!

Who says you need a entire car to drive around in. This two seat car looks nice and comfortable. The only issue looks to be that it stops quite abruptly when reversing.

Hans Scharler has been busy making a DIY Steampunk Pumpkin that is sure to please anyone who sees it. He squished tons of parts in there from some of the best DIY providers. His own ioBridge, some sensors from Adafruit, some ThingM (designed by Tod Kurt) parts from Sparkfun.

"Using the ioBridge IO-204, I rigged up the fog machine to trigger when someone walked in front of the pumpkin. I used a passive infrared sensor from Adafruit to detect motion. The IO-204 has an upcoming feature that allows for on board logic, meaning you can break off of the Internet and have local controls take over. To integrate it with the fog machine, I tapped into the wireless remote control that came with the fog machine. This made it easy to control using a single relay. To light the pumpkin, I bought a BlinkM RGB LED Blaster from Sparkfun. The LEDs are high intensity lights that you can mix colors together."

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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The guys over at Mana Potions have developed a cool new way to play the new AION and get some exercise at the same time. Looks like running and flapping at the same time may be kind of hard but it is a good idea to get a bit of a workout. I wonder how long it will be before more game consoles and game manufactures make exercise part of the required game play?

"We used a Targus Bluetooth adapter and installed Blue Soleil to connect our wiimotes to our PC. Blue Soleil is great, because it doesn’t require a passkey when you pair the PC with the wiimotes. Once the wiimotes were connected, we used GlovePIE to translate the data from the wiimotes into useful keypresses in Aion. The keys are a piece of cake to map, but getting the script to accurately represent flap speed using the accelerometers in the wiimotes required a couple lines of scripting. The script detects a flap as exceeding a certain acceleration in the relative y-axis of the wiimote, then decides if that flap happened soon enough after the previous flap to count. If so, it stops holding down the F (fall) key and starts holding down the R (rise) key until the flapping becomes too slow."

I am usually more interested in taking very close up pictures of small electronic items. If you are interested in close up photography have a look at this Instructable that bloomautomatic put together for that. On the other hand I have never tried to take these type of cool outdoor pictures but I think next time I am out snapping some pictures I will have to keep my eye open for some cool placement trickery like in these pictures!

"This shot was taken at the Perito Moreno glacier in the Argentine region of Patagonia. The 250 km2 (97 sq mi) ice formation is an important tourist attraction, and the sheets of frozen fresh water clearly offer ample opportunity for a little playfulness with visual perspective."

"This touching shot makes aiming for the top not such a fanciful dream after all. The most famous landmark on the Parisian landscape is the perfect prop to make this little girl seem like a giant standing some 324 m (1,063 ft) tall. The low camera angle and large depth of field do the rest of the work."

"Nova Scotia’s Peggy’s Cove provides the setting for this next addition to our list. This small rural community is nevertheless a busy tourist attraction, and its classic red-and-white lighthouse is major focal point for visitors carrying cameras. Believe it or not, it’s almost 15 metres (50 ft) high."