Halloween!

There’s a lot of spooky Pi shenanigans going on this Halloween. Here at Pi Towers, our very own Rachel Rayns is trialling the first run of the Raspberry Pi Digital Creatives Bronze award we plan to be running formally from 2015. (More of that in a later post.) Amy and Dan Mather are acting as our guinea pigs for this trial; and here are the (orange, approximately spherical) fruits of their first day’s labour. I’ll be prodding the Mather kids for a write-up on how to rotoscope your own face onto a pumpkin soon. A little further from home, at one of my favourite places in the UK, the team at the Lost Gardens of Heligan have made a slightly-too-successful Halloween project. People walking past this installation trigger a motion sensor, which makes a speaker up in the tree hoot in a Halloween fashion. “Slightly-too-successful” in this instance means that at twilight, visitors walking past triggered the audio: and real, female tawny owls responded to it, and were attracted to the tree. Which is great for owl-spotters, but a bit unfair on the owls. So the Heligan team swapped out the audio for the blood-curdling howls of a wolf (not native to Cornwall), and all was well again. You can read more about the project over at our friend Phil Atkin’s blog. Further afield, Cabe Atwell in the USA has a haunted porch. (Careful watching this one if you have small children in the room – it’s a bit unsettling.) There’s a lot of how-to detail in Cabe’s video, and a full write-up over at element14. Back in the UK, Halloween’s being used as a teaching tool by TeCoEd. Here’s a how-to video, and you’ll find everything you need to make one yourself next year at TeCoEd’s website. You’ll find plenty more projects from previous years under the Halloween tag. Have you made something spooky with a Pi this year? Let us know in the comments!

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/halloween/