It's the spooky season with Halloween approaching fast. Now I don't really go in for all the American 'Trick or Treat' stuff - in fact I find it totally disgusting that shops now sell terror masks, blood-laden hatchets and other such creepy stuff that parents buy their pre-teenage kids. No wonder our society is in the mess it is with murder and rape talked about openly every day on TV as if it were just a fact of life. Of course, I blame the media (films, TV and computer games) for all this, but don't start me off on that one.
I hate it so much, that now my kids are grown up and go out to fancy dress parties on Halloween, I just lock the door and pretend that I'm out. However, as a kid I did enjoy making a good Halloween lantern out of a suede (we never saw pumpkins where I lived) and a candle. Of course, the idea of the lantern is to ward off evil spirits and so I'm totally OK with that.
So now it's time to bring the Halloween lantern into the modern world and what better than to use a battery driven Arduino-type system to produce the flickering lights that won't blow out in the wind. Even better if it springs in to life when approached by an evil spirit, i.e. a kid.
To make this project the following items are needed:
- A Shrimp with a battery pack
- The Arduino IDE on your computer
- A Halloween lantern sweet bowl bought from a 'pound shop'
- Seven coloured LEDS
- Seven 220 ohm resistors
- A CP2120 PIR sensor
- Some wire, solder and a soldering iron
