Electrify Your Halloween! Making it Move!

In late September, I  led a workshop at the Duxbury Free library on making interactive Halloween displays, and more recently I set my project up on our porch for Halloween.  One of the most effective ways to make your front porch scary and immersive is to pay attention to sound, and to make things move.

The first part (making it scream) was documented in this post. This is about the movement part, creating a pop-up inflatable ghost, completely from scratch. It was very successful and popular!with the kids. Unfortunately I didn’t get any video, but I can cover the construction.

I like inflatables, and wanted to try making my own. One thing that made this really easy was a really cool product called Powerswitch Tail. This allows you to control an AC outlet from a digital signal. Its available from Adafruit and Makershed. It’s essentially a short extension cord with an opto-isolated relay in line. This eliminates any dangerous AC wiring with relays, and protects your Arduino and other circuits as well.

Next I needed to make the Ghost. I use white kitchen trashbags at home, and I took three of them, two laid end to end (with the end of one cut off.) I cut the third bag in in thirds and used the outside sections for arms. I used simple transparent packing tape to bond the edges.

 

A total of 3 bags (top and bottom, both arms)

I used one of those small vortex fans, and taped it around the output side.

 

Boo! Attached to the fan, and inflated.

Hook the powerswitch tail to a digital IO on an Arduino and you are good to go. As I mentioned in the last post, you can get the code on github here.