The theme of this years Halloween yard haunt was ancient temple. As such I was taking a lot of inspiration from the Indiana Jones franchise. After some initial sketches we came up with a story. The ancient temple has been discovered by intrepid archeologists but, they have unleashed the deadly curse, do the trick or treaters dare to take candy from the scared bowl, or will they suffer the same fate?
We built the walls and the giant temple face out of Styrofoam. We carved it with a hot wire, then used a heat gun and some water to give the “stone” texture. After the sculpting was all done, I painted them and gave them a hard coat finish. Mounting these to the porch wasn’t too bad, I glued the Styrofoam to a wood frame, then used L brackets to secure the frame to the porch.
For the electronics of the head, I used both an Arduino Uno and a Raspberry Pi. The Pi was used to play the audio and to receive the trigger signal from the ultrasonic sensor. The Arduino took care of the LEDs and the relays. The overall effect was that as the kids came up to get candy, the lights would turn off, the music would play and the LEDs for the eyes would come on. I wanted to hook up the smoke machine to run off the relay as well, but I ran out of time, maybe next year.
For the rest of the yard, we build a tent out of bamboo poles and a bamboo fence to keep suggest to kids that they not go through the yard, you can get a lot of bamboo from Home Depot for $80.
After Halloween was over this year we were pleasantly surprised, not only had we received lots of praise from neighbors and trick or treaters, but a number of people had put us down for a local Halloween decorations competition and we won best theming.
Next year we’ll have to think of a theme that we can reuse some of this stuff, we’re thinking haunted castle.
