A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

• How To Make bright green fire | Wonder How To — cool looking, i wonder how toxic this is
• Cheap ambient lighting with rope lights. Cool idea, my mausoleum could use this
• simple DMX controller. I went away from DMX as most of my effects are outside, and water doesn’t mix with dmx cabling, but maybe there is a way to rework my system — after all i basically moved all control electronics into the garage last year and just ran power cables out.
• Planningwiz floor plan software — i use a plan to layout all my halloween plans, this might be a simpler tool

• Automate Your Home – Wired How-To Wiki — some solutions to try here, some mac solutions
• home automation app for the iphone coming…

Perceptive Automation Releases Indigo 3.0, Mac OS X Home Control Server | eHomeUpgrade — I’m going to need an X10/zwave control program for the mac for future halloweens, perhaps this one.

Electric Motors for Props – Bride of Power Pack – Halloween Prop Building Supplies For The Home Haunter – Monster Guts — new product from these guys for halloween, a variable speed power controller for wiper motors. pretty useful and not crazy expensive. and halloween is less than 6 months out…

Midi Madness — some wildly cool devices here that I would never use.

1-Wire Devices – Maxim — interesting low cost control wiring and protocol. Maybe useful for halloween projects. Via Wes Felter

I still have a few old crufty X10 devices I control at Halloween time. I am seeing a lot of Zigbee and Zwave products and think I need to move on for next Halloween. Just a couple examples:

• eHomeUpgrade | New XBee Wall Router Makes it Easy to Deploy and Extend ZigBee Networks
• USB Zwave

• Outdoor Garden Statues – Decor — some resin statuary up here that would be good in a graveyard setting
• Inflatable Hearse — a little too cheesy maybe. but cool.
• MAKE special halloween edition — ordered
• Servo-Center. need to dig into more
• The Hand. Would be awesome to play with

Found via Make, uC Hobby ? Blog Archive ? Free Electronics Hobby Software — a useful collection of resistor decoders, 555 timer info, schematic library links.

Here’s some more free links at Freebyte including pcb layout software, pinout references, datasheets.

and some more at epanorama.net including SPICE.

Geez it is may and I haven’t done crap for Halloween planning. The time to buy parts and build is rapidly approaching. Monster Guts sent me nice reminder spam, I might try some pressure mats this year.

Kurt pointed this out to me — EFX-TEK :: Prop-2 Controller — new version, more outputs, BS2 syntax. Looking good.

Spark Fun Electronics — an alternative to basic stamps, and the sparkfun website looks like a good vendor for various electronics thingies.

Q-Manager Audio Playback and Show Control Software — meant to try this out this year but never got around to it. Perhaps next…

Continuing to plug away on my halloween surround sound setup — A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Halloween Surround Sound Status One awesomely great feature of the turtlebeach audioadvantage roadie is the headphone jack. You can use it simultaneously with the spdif out — so many sound cards turn off the speaker out when a headphone is detected. here you can use both. the documented use is to attach another pair of speakers to create a 7.1 setup. But for halloween you can use this extra output to drive your lightning controller such as the i-zombie.

So my sound is working great. my lighting controllers are all firing. now i am playing around with lights — halogen worklights, par lights, some low voltage stuff — to create the best effect.

Oh and i am working on my other surround sound config which won’t be lightning, but will be ambient graveyard sounds.

A reader recommended this — Haunt Controller – Software for automating your haunt – holiday display – animatronics — PC software that interfaces with these kit74 relay boards. Looks kind of cool. I think it is too late for me to play around with this halloween but I would certainly consider for next. I guess it doesn’t give me materially different controllability than my DMX software and dimmers but it is a lot cheaper.

Feld Thoughts: Where Has BASIC Gone? — Feld and commenters participate in the discussion about BASIC.

I’ve recently come back to BASIC, programming BASIC stamps for Halloween. I have to say, it is quite fun to be able to jump into a program so fast without all the object/ui/typing/etc overhead of “modern” languages or “modern” incarnations of BASIC. totally dangerous of course, but still quite fun. i’d rather be able to use python or something a bit more au courant, but they don’t make Python stamps.

• TCRG Links — bunches of suppliers and info sites
• servo connector pin-out — i needed this this week

I’d never seen this before Creature Supply — records 4 minutes of firing events for 6 output lines, and then replays on receipt of an input trigger (IR, switchmat, etc). Seems useful.

MachineDesign.com: Right-sizing pneumatic motion systems — good breakdown of how to analyze pneumatic circuits, pointed out to me by the author.

Circuit Specialists Inc. – PowerSupply1 Single Output Switching Power Supplies