Posted by: pat 12 years, 1 month ago
Red Skeleton is coming back. Here he is from last year:
He is in dire need of new jokes. If you have a Halloween-themed joke for him please send it in to me by email or using the Contact page.
Every year I make a few tweaks and enhancements to the Halloween display. This year I am adding fog to the mix. The question is whether I will fabricate a fog chiller to get it to hang low on the ground.
I would like to figure out how to get my stepper motors for the spiders to reliably return to a consistent starting position. Isn't that supposed to be the advantage of stepper motors? They are supposed to always move an exact amount. So if I tell them to spin forward 10 revolutions and then back 10 revolutions, they should end up right where they started. Well they don't. Maybe my linkages are slipping, or maybe I've overstressed the steppers to the point where they don't work perfectly. I've thought of adding an optical sensor tied to a piece of black tape on the PVC pipe I rotate to raise and lower the spiders to make things really closed-loop, but that seems like overkill. I'm going to work on the linkages as the first suspect.
I do have an idea for a new prop that will make a ghost or monster light up and whizz through the sky back and forth, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to mount the rope and pulley system it will need. I kinda want to attach it to a telephone pole across the street but fear that might be overly ambitious.
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