Have questions about wiring or code you’ve seen in a past live event? Or, are you feeling stuck with your project? Stop by any time from 7 – 9 PM EST and let’s chat about it!

Even if you can’t attend the live event, I regularly comb through your posts to see where you are with your projects and try to tackle as many as I can with participating members. Then I’ll post whatever wiring diagrams and code we come up with to your project thread.

To get the most out of the Office Hours event, tell us about your project and where you’re getting stuck beforehand by starting or updating a thread in Project Help.

If you need help with your project let me know!

Got a Halloween prop that looks creepy…but doesn’t actually do anything?

You know the ones — those inexpensive hanging grim reapers, ghosts, skeletons, and monsters made from little more than a hollow plastic head, wire arms, and yards of tattered fabric. They’re great for filling out a home or yard haunt, and you can often find them in multi-packs or on clearance for next to nothing.

Hang them from a tree and the wind might make them sway ominously.

But that’s about as exciting as they get.

We’re going to fix that.

Part 1: Building the Reaper’s New Electronic Guts

For our first session, we’re going old school.

No Arduino. No ESP32. No microcontroller. And absolutely no code.

Just electronic components, wires, a breadboard…and possibly a little magic smoke if things go terribly wrong.

We’ll build and test the circuit that will transform our cheap static decoration into a motion-activated Halloween character.

Normally, our Grim Reaper will simply hang there quietly, swaying in the breeze and waiting for his next victim.

Then someone walks by…

A PIR motion sensor detects the presence of a living soul and awakens the Reaper.

• His eyes begin glowing blood red.
• An MP3 player module plays one of his sinister messages or sound effects.
• And a vibration motor hidden inside the prop begins shaking his lightweight body and flowing fabric as he speaks.

Suddenly our cheap static decoration isn’t quite so lifeless anymore.

We’ll breadboard everything first so we can experiment, troubleshoot, and fine-tune the circuit before performing surgery on our patient.

By the end, we’ll have taken one of the cheapest and simplest decorations in the Halloween aisle and transformed it into something that looks, moves, lights up, and sounds like a much more expensive animated prop.

And more importantly, you’ll understand how to use the same basic techniques to resurrect your own lifeless Halloween decorations.