This was the first year I used walls to form rooms and hallways within the garage. The walls were made of 72-inch-wide sheets of black felt. They were held up using strips of 2-inch-wide velcro attached to the rafters of the garage. This resulted in a surprisingly strong hold. I only had one issue with one panel being partially pulled down on Halloween night, and it was quickly fixed. The best thing about the velcro was how quick and easy it was to put the walls up and take them down.
Because the garage was now divided into sections, I no longer used the beam-breakage sensor I had used in every previous year to trigger all the events in the garage, so there was no master microcontroller controlling all the other props. Instead, I acquired a number of motion sensors from Parallax. I ended up using 3 this year: one for the witch, one for the spider, and one for the pirate. Once they were properly aimed, and their visibility was limited with an empty toilet paper roll, they were very reliable. I am sure I will be using them again next year.
While I did not have a master microcontroller, I did still have a master kill switch near the entrance to the garage. When this switch was off, all the props went to sleep. They stopped performing any movement that they normally did all the time (e.g. the witch stopped stirring) and they stopped paying attention to the motion sensor. This allowed the actors to move about the garage without triggering all the props.
The monster in a box prop did not use a motion sensor. Since that was the most startling prop in the garage, I wanted to have more control over it so that when a very young child was going through, it wouldn't automatically fire. Instead, I bought a couple of RF receiver modules, along with the corresponding keychain transmitters, from All Electronics. These appear to basically be a 12VDC relay that closes when the "on" button is pressed on the transmitter. I simply fed this signal into an input on the microcontroller for the MITB so that it could detect when the button was pressed. I was very happy with how this device performed.
Lighting was another area that I improved upon this year. Because of the walls, the two light bulbs in the garage were not going to be enough to light everything up properly. So, I bought a number of clamp light fixtures and some colored bulbs and spotlights and hung them from the rafters at strategic locations in the garage.
In order to bring attention to my talking props, I built a couple of outlet/relay modules. I bought some solid state relays (SSRs). I wired each into an electrical box with an outlet so that I could control the outlet from a microcontroller. Then, it was just a matter of plugging one of the clamp lights into the outlet, and the microcontroller controlling the witch could turn the light on right before she started talking and turn it off when she finished.
I also made a couple of dimmer modules. These were similar to the relay module above, but instead had a manual (i.e. not controllable from a microcontroller) dimmer switch. This allowed me to plug a light into the outlet and control the brightness of the light.
Halloween 2006 Index
Halloween Index
Page last modified 05/18/2011