If you have 3 servo motors, some scary eyes, a few Popsicle sticks and an Arduino you can also make a some crazy eyes! Just add a white sheet and stick these Servo controlled Eyes under it and you will have the scariest ghost on the block.

"It consists of the following components:
- 2 toy eyeballs or ping pong balls painted like eyeballs
- 2 small servos (HXT500 from HobbyKing.com or similar)
- 1 standard servo
- 1 Arduino with tiny breadboard rubber-banded on top
- 2 BlinkMs, one for each eyeball, running a custom light script
- hot glue, popsicle sticks, and bits of wire
- Arduino sketch (ScaryShiftyServoEyeballs.pde)"

In the video the Spooky Dropper is setup to deliver a bat right in front of the victim. It could drop a spider, ghost, rat or anything else you can dream up! It can reset itself automatically using one normal servo and one that has been modified for continuous operation. This is begging to be hooked up to a motion detector or even the door bell circuit to launch at just the right time. To see the full documentation of Vern Graner’s project have a look at the Halloween edition of Nuts and Volts Magazine.

If you have a Halloween project of your own, why not add it to the list of projects in the Show us your Halloween Project Contest.

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."

Before you say this LED Controller doesn’t look micro, have a look at the board in the picture below with a 9 volt battery snap to compare it to. This board is tiny! You could hide this thing in model cars, train sets, props, this list goes on an on. Also the interface is a single button, it doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Via: HG Forum

Kieran Nolan recently held a workshop for ISEA 2009 on Hacking Toys into Tangible Interfaces. During the workshop he hacked together usb keyboards with toy keytars to build DIY guitar game controllers. Now you know what to do with all those old toys when your kids outgrow them.

Most of us know what a Tractor Pull is but how many people can say they have seen it done in 1/32nd scale? That is exactly what this 8 Slot Motor Tractor Puller is and look closely that tiny rig is pulling 4 1/2 pounds!

"A 1/32nd scale tractor puller using 8 slot car motors geared together. Tractor is 8" long. Pull sled has 2 lbs in the hopper and sled chassis weighs 2 1/2 pounds."

This is a cool way to remote control your car. The microcontroller is a bit of an older one, have a look at the 16f628 for a more modern one these days. Have a look at the build history to see the beginnings of this intro project.

Via: HG Forum

"I basically took a remote controlled car, and connected it to a 16F84 programmable chip, and now I can control the car using C code."