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Arduino Halloween Dropping Spider (Build It)
Adafruit Protoshield, arduino, Arduino Duemilanove, Arduino Project, Arduino Sketch, Arduino Twitter, Contest Entries, Futaba Servos, ioBridge Monitor, LED, Parallax, PIR Motion Sensor, servo, Wireless Webcam, X10 Firecracker Comments Off on Arduino Halloween Dropping Spider (Build It)
Halloween Dropping Spider
Contest Entry by Noel Portugal
My Halloween project consisted of a dropping spider triggered by a PIR motion sensor mounted on a Jackolantern. The motion sensor triggered a dropping spider, lights, sounds, low laying fog and finally a tweet with a picture attached.
Setup: It’s all pretty basic. The arduino controlled the PIR motion sensor, the servos for dropping spider reel, Jackolantern LED lights, toy with scary sound, and the X10 CM17A. Then the arduino sent a serial message to the ioBridge serial API telling to GET the URL of my site. Then on my site I had a bash script with a while loop looking for request coming from the ioBridge server, then the script played a sound, grab the picture from a wireless webcam and post it to twitter via twitpic’s API using cURL.
Arduino Halloween Dropping Spider
Arduino Sketch
Here is the arduino sketch. I used the X10Firecracker and the Servo libraries as well as the PIR sensor example from the arduino playground.
Spider Reel
I end up using an VHS tape as a reel. I had to modify one servo to have continuous rotation. I used this guide to do so. The second servo just did the lift part.
ioBridge Monitor
To establish the arduino-ioBridge serial communication I was planning to use an RF solution, but due to time constraints I had to use a long speaker cable to connect the arduino TX to ioBridge’s Serial Board RX with one wire and the second for GND.
This is the bash script I used to trigger a sound as well as send a twitpic.
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#!/bin/bash
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booCounter=$1
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while true;do
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status=`tail -n 1 /private/var/log/apache2/access_log | cut -f 1 -d "-"`
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if [ "$status" = "00.00.000.000 " ]
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then
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echo "Boo" >> /private/var/log/apache2/access_log
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afplay /full/path/Halloween/werewolf.mp3
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msg="Boo, victim $booCounter just got really scared"
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sleep 5
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curl -O http://www.mywebcam.com/IMAGE.JPG
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curl -F media=@/full/path/Halloween/IMAGE.JPG -F "username=username" -F "password=password" -F
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"message=$msg" http://twitpic.com/api/uploadAndPost
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let booCounter=booCounter+1
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fi
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done
I used my mac os x Apache 2 server. I had to give write permissions to the access_log so I could append a bogus line as a “break”.
These are the parts that I used for this project:
Arduino Duemilanove
o Adafruit Protoshield
ioBridge IO-204
o ioBridge Serial Smart Board
x10 Firecracker CM17A
o x10 Transeiver, Appliance and lamp modules
VHS tape
o 2 Futaba S3003 servos
o Nylon rope
Plastic Jackolantern
o Parallax PIR sensor
o 2 red LEDs
+ 2 1K resistors
o Checklane Yada Yada Yada (thanks Erick for the tip http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-controlled-Silly-String-shooter/)
+ 1 2N2222 tranisistor
+ 1 10k resistor
Fog Machine
o 125VAC/10A DPDT Plug-In Relay (as a switch combined with x10)
o Styrofoam cooler and dryer hose and Ice to create low laying fog.
Wireless webcam
Lights and accesories
o Incandescent black light, strobe light, black light bulbs.
Project Video:
