Published October 27, 2017 © GPL3+

Halloween-of-Things (HoT) And Your Little Internet Too

This project is a Halloween effects controller with video to capture the expressions of the trick-or-treaters and control some effects.

IntermediateProtip16 hours839

Halloween-of-Things (HoT) And Your Little Internet Too

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

PIR Motion Sensor (generic)

Molex headers

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Hot glue gun (generic)

Story

Part 1

This was supposed to be a Google Android Things entry: https://www.hackster.io/contests/Google/projects

I found out, however, that I could finish the project in time for Halloween with just some Python code, so here it is. I found some inexpensive battery-operated motion sensing LED lights at the local hardware store.

I removed the circuit board from the housing, unsoldered the battery clips and replaced the LEDs with Molex headers.

I used a rather scary creepy clown mask to hide all the parts inside.

Part 2

I glued two LEDs into the eye holes and ran the wires back to the motion detector.

I used a Styrofoam dummy head as a base and cut out material to fit in a webcam.

The finished head looks like this:

I found some scary Halloween sounds on the net to use for this project:

http://soundbible.com/1129-Maniacal-Witches-Laugh.html

The motion detector is wired to a raspberry pi GPIO17 pin, and when the software detects a change, it captures a photo from the hidden webcam, then plays the maniacal witches laugh through a small amplifier. It will also send me an email with the photo attached if I choose. The software is based on one of the many raspberry pi doorbell projects found on the web. This is a good example:

http://harizanov.com/2013/07/raspberry-pi-emalsms-doorbell-notifier-picture-of-the-person-ringing-it/

All I have to do now is mount it on a chair and stuff some clothing with newspaper and wait for the Trick-or-Treaters.

Code

Scary Clown Code

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
import os
import pygame
from shutil import copyfile
IRinputPin = 17
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(IRinputPin,GPIO.IN, pull_up_down=GPIO.PUD_UP)
count = 10
pygame.mixer.init()
pygame.mixer.music.load("/home/pi/Music/Witch.mp3")
print('System Reset')
while (count>0):
    print(count)
    count-=1
    time.sleep(1)
print('System Armed')
while True:
    print('Waiting for input')
    if (GPIO.input(IRinputPin)):
        time.sleep(1)
    else:
        print('IR input detected')
        os.system("fswebcam -r 960x720 -d /dev/video0 /home/pi/webcam.jpg")
        timestr = time.strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
        filename2 = ('/home/pi/'+timestr+'.jpg')
        copyfile('/home/pi/webcam.jpg', filename2)
        print('Saving Picture')
        os.system("python /home/pi/sendnotify.py")
        print('Sending email')
        pygame.mixer.music.play()
        print('Resetting System')
        count = 30
        while (count>0):
            print(count)
            count-=1
            time.sleep(1)
        print('System Armed')