Some of Our Favorite Arduino Pranks for April Fools’ Day

When Arduino Day happens to fall on April 1st, you just have to create a list of some fun gags!

Digital Ding Dong Ditch is a system by Samy Kamkar that can hack into and ring a friend’s wireless doorbell whenever you send a text message to the device.

Grab a bite to eat, sit in front of the television, then press the remote button. Where’s that noise coming from? It’s from a place no other than the Haunted Prank Remote — an annoying ring that goes off every time your unsuspecting victim pushes a button on his or her TV remote.

Want to drive your roommates nuts? Connor Nishijima has just the thing for you: an Arduino cricket. Unlike the actual insects that are relatively consistent with the sounds they make, this project will chirp for a brief second, and then go into a deep sleep for a random amount of time between three minutes and three hours.

A great last-minute joke, this Arduino-driven Kleenex box moves whenever a person tries to grab a tissue from it.

A few years ago, Tinkernut built an Arduino-powered spray bottle that employs a PIR sensor to detect when someone passes by and rapidly squirt them with water.

Using an ultrasonic sensor, an Arduino Uno, a SparkFun MP3 Shield with an SD card full of screams, and a Bose SoundLink Mini speaker, YouTuber Starcraft387 has devised a discrete way to scare the hell out of your parents or significant other.

Hidden inside Becky Stern’s fashionable accessory is a stealthy purpose — it powers down TV sets from across the room! The wearable is equipped with an Adafruit FLORA, a push button, some IR LEDs, and a LiPo battery for ultimate portability.

Our friends at SparkFun always know how to celebrate April Fools’. This year, Nick Poole turned an e-cigarette tank and a vacuum pump into a tiny, remote-activated smoke machine. Simply fill the tank with glycerin and you can make convincing smoke for cosplay, theater, or yes, pranking your colleagues!

How does Ted Chen enjoy harassing his friends? By developing a nifty gadget capable of flooding his buddies’ inboxes with anonymous messages from strangers.

Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose your neighbors. However, what can choose is how you put up with them. Take YouTuber “Jamil,” for example, who back in 2012 decided to take a more passive-aggressive (and rather ingenious) approach for dealing with the loud folks next door. The Maker had set up an Arduino-controlled stereo that senses when the nearby residents play their tunes, automatically triggering his CD player to blast a snippet of “Who Let the Dogs Out?”