Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (10 page)

H
alloween is a big day for geeky parents and kids. Between coming up with cool homemade costumes and spooky decorations, it’s one holiday when you can really get creative and have some terrific fun. The most traditional project of Halloween, of course, is the jack-o’-lantern (JoL). But for a truly geeky family, after a while a simple cutout scary face with a tea candle inside just isn’t exciting enough anymore. This chapter will help you turn a tradition into a high-tech project with real geeky appeal!

The winter solstice holidays are also a particularly family-focused time for most households, and geeky households are no different. Any GeekDad worth his salt will do his best to re-create the best parts of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where it comes to decorating, and many of us do our best to incorporate technology into the outdoor decorations.

But what about the indoor decorations? Whether it be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus that we celebrate, we have to assert our geeky identities! These ideas are great for geeking up the holidays.

This project isn’t so much a single project as a series of ideas for creating JoLs that will make you the talk of your neighborhood. There are a lot of special carving kits available these days to get really creative images on your JoLs—not just faces but all kinds of structures and words. Many of them involve carving away the outer skin and some of the fruit so that lighting inside backlights the imagery. Those are pretty, but they’re not what we’re after here.

Rather, we’re going to go back to the core idea of the JoL—the carved face—and build from that with three dimensions that add life to any JoL: light, sound, and movement.

Many special JoL carving sets come out around Halloween, and many special carving tools get sold. They are, as famous food geek Alton Brown might say, pathetic unitaskers that will get used once and then left in a drawer for a year. Save your money and use the tools you already have. And when I say tools, I mean tools.

While a big serrated knife is okay for the heavy cutting, it’s really much faster and more satisfying to use your handheld saber saw! And if you want to do interesting cuts that don’t go all the way through the meat, how about a router? You can set it to a depth that won’t go all the way through, and then carve out shapes and spaces where you can add some of the items suggested below in the other sections.

And though the traditional JoL face is all well and good, power tools can make other ideas much easier to achieve. For instance, instead of cutting the mouth like a traditional smiley, try a power drill with a ¼-inch bit, and drill a series of holes to look like the grille on an industrial speaker.

Just make sure that, as you would with kitchen tools, you clean up your power tools properly. You don’t want to come back to your drill in a couple weeks to find moldy pumpkin, do you?

The classic construction of a JoL includes a candle in the middle of the pumpkin. You can also now use a battery-powered light instead, but most people don’t think bigger than a single light. For our JoL, let’s use the programmed BlinkM unit we first tried in the Cool LEGO Lighting from Repurposed Parts project (page 191). Please refer to that project for how to program your BlinkM unit, but this time make the pattern something eerie, like a slowly shifting medley of darker colors with the occasional bright flash. Once programmed, it can go inside your JoL just like a candle would, and it can be powered from a DC converter or a battery pack. Other unique but easy sources you could use are flashlights with colored plastic wrap over them, or any of the strobes available around the holiday.

But you can do more with lights. Perhaps the BlinkM is intended just to give a glow from the mouth of your cyborg JoL. For the eyes, get a pair of LED key chain flashlights and cut the eyeholes so they fit just flush inside the surface of the pumpkin. Or pick up two (or more) of the tinyCylon LED kits from
www.makershed.com
. You could mount them vertically or horizontally into cutout eye sockets and time their blinking patterns for a variety of effects, from creepy robot “scanners” to nutty cross-eyes.

Sound is a great—and relatively easy—dimension to add to your JoL. The cheapest route is to find an old MP3 player—come on, you know you have a two-generation-old iPod or even one of those thumb-driven el cheapo kinds lying around somewhere. Add that to a battery-powered speaker or (if you’re already using external power for your lights) a computer speaker that will fit inside the pumpkin, and you’re nearly set to go. Dredge up a good spooky soundtrack and some eerie sound effects, or make yourself a play-list of Halloween songs, and you’ve got your audio.

To take it one step further, you can create a live version. Put a wireless speaker inside the pumpkin and hook it up to your laptop. Use a mic and some kind of voice-modulating software to produce a really creepy voice, then watch as people come to the door and comment to them about their costumes. To make it really believable, mount a wireless webcam in the pumpkin as well so you don’t have to be peeking out a window to see your victims. The effect is really, really cool.

Sound-activated circuits (you know, what made The Clapper work) are also fairly inexpensive and are available online in a variety of places. Use that to activate the light you have inside the pumpkin (May require programming! Good thing you already learned how in the Lamp project on page 191 . . .). Then the interior light could blink on and off as you speak through the wireless speaker, making the effect of a talking cyborg JoL just that much more awesome.

To fully realize the cyborg effect, you’ll need some kind of movement. Perhaps the lid of the JoL could turn and jostle, or laser pointers mounted on the side of the JoL could rotate when people approach. The possibilities are endless.

Two possible methods for making these ideas work are:

The first method is to rip out the guts of an old RC car (maybe a former LEGO Art Car Demolition Derby vehicle) and use the steering and driving mechanisms.

Or second, and a little more expensive (unless, as a good geeky parent, you already have a set), is to use your LEGO Mindstorms NXT set. You could cut the bottom out of your JoL and have it sit over a wheeled robot base built from the Mindtorms set. Then you can control it via remote or even program the robot to move when it “hears” noises or “sees” movement. How creepy would that be?!

You’re obviously going to need a fairly large pumpkin if you’re going to fit all these features inside. Power tools are a great way to do a lot of the cutting work easily. In my time I’ve used power drills and saber saws to build my JoLs.

If you’re going to have electronics inside, the pumpkin will need to be well cleaned out, and pretty dry as well. Consider putting paper towels on the bottom to absorb latent moisture. And the bottom will need to be as flat as you can get it. To run external power into the pumpkin, simply drill a good hole in the back side to feed cords in. If you need to mount things on the inside sides, try building a scaffolding of taped-together bamboo skewers that pierce the fruit.

In the end, a family’s JoL is a very personal creation, and no two are ever exactly alike. If you use any of the ideas in this chapter, please take pictures or some video and post them in the forums for this project at
www.geekdadbook.com
. I’d love to see them and share them with the community.

As we’ve already discussed, LEGO is a geek’s best friend, especially when it comes to building things yourself. So, if you’re going to make your own decorations, why not break out the bricks?

You can save the money you might be tempted to spend at a certain greeting card store on tree ornaments that look like the star-ships from your (our) favorite science fiction television shows. Build something cool instead!?

A really easy and very repeatable project is to build a small LEGO holiday tree and then use the battery and LED concept from the Fireflies project on page 117 to add tree lights. Indeed, because LEDs don’t get hot, you can get a very cool effect by their shining from within the colored, transparent LEGO bricks:

If it wouldn’t violate your level of orthodoxy, you could apply this idea to a menorah instead (or as well). Build a LEGO menorah, with each of the cups designed as a repository for one of the fireflies. This applies to the traditional lighting for Kwanzaa, too. But there is more to try beyond LEGO.

One very common decoration, whether it be Christmas or its cultural predecessor, the winter solstice, is the wreath. From the Wikipedia entry under “Advent Wreath”:

While these were horizontal wreaths (which eventually became the Advent wreath), at some point they also went vertical and were hung on walls or doors as decoration. These days, there’s quite a lively business around the design of decorative wreaths.