"Mr. Bones" is a plastic skeleton my mom gave the girls a long time ago. We like to dance with him, dress him up and put him in weird poses. His arms often fall off.
For the past month I've been thinking about using Mr. Bones in a porch display for Halloween. This morning I woke up designing it so I surrendered and just built the damn thing. I used an Arduino to control LEDs for the eyes and heart. The biggest challenge was designing code to generate independent waveforms in a single loop (for the geeks out there, I ended up doing it by populating two lookup tables and the main loop just steps through them in parallel). I assembled the soundtrack from free sound effects found on the web and edited them together in Garage Band; it will play on an iPod with speakers.
This is the first time I've built an "animatronic" Halloween display. I think they're just going to have to get better every year, now. Next year's will include motion.
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