Crystal Ball

The Crystal Ball of Horror was my entry into the http://www.tinyclr.com/ Halloween contest.

UPDATE: 11/11-2010

I got second place in the contest http://www.tinyclr.com/ :-) and I'm very happy with that. This gave me a coupon for $150 so I just ordered two more FEZ Panda Tinkerer Kits and a SD card extension board.

I wanted to make something that wouldn’t scare the kids so much that they would keep me up at night, but still be a good Halloween prop.
Coming from Norway, Halloween is relative new to us and not many having any props outside the house.

I had this mounted on outside on Halloween and it gave quit a few children a fright. :-)

I started out buying a plastic light fixture and built a box around that to contain the electronics.
The box had to hold;

• FEZ Domino as I wanted to use the SD card and audio playback
• PIR sensor to trigger the animation (concealed behind the keyhole)
• A circuit board to hold transistors controlling the RGBs
• $5,- amplifier
• Speaker
• Servo, RGBs, an ultra bright LED and other stuff

The plan was just to superimpose a pumpkin head but that wasn’t all that cool so I came up with the idea of making an eye instead and it came out pretty good.

Some more pictures from the build

The $5,- amplifier

The eye is a clip art iris printed out on overhead film and glued onto a piece of Plexiglas.

The programming was easy with NETMF (I do hope more of you people would check it out).

I probably won’t win the competition but still it was a fun project to do.