Distributed Control System - Personal Project - Current
The Distributed Control System is an ongoing initiative to standardize and expand the control systems of my home haunt. It brings together video, audio, DMX, prop control, and the Animately project (see below) to allow for more complex and coordinated scenes to play out.
The system is designed to use consumer-grade inexpensive hardware, be horizontally scalable, and quick to deploy. Click the diagram image above for more details of how the system is being put together.
Animately - Personal Project - Current
Animately is a series of ongoing projects to standardize the animation and control of my individual props. It consists of both a microcontroller deployment and a desktop app. The microcontroller app is a “dumb“ animation playback system. Animately Studio is the larger desktop app that’s used to design the animations and feed the microcontroller playback modules.
Sparking Fuse Box - Personal Project
This startle prop utilizes a high-voltage coil to create a loud sparking sound. It also has fiber optics, sound, and movement. I can remotely trigger it when a guest walks by using a small fob. Extra care was taken to make sure the high-voltage was in a location where the guests could not accidentally come into contact with it.
The board is a custom ATmega-based board, with mosfets for the coil and motor control and LEDs to drive the fiber optics. The entire assembly was modeled in Fusion 360 before starting and then individual components were 3D printed.
Pepper’s Ghost - Personal Project
Built as an homage to The Haunted Mansion, this was a large-scale pepper’s ghost effect that I built that featured two “dancing” skeletons that would seemingly fade in and out of existence. A 10W RGB LED with a custom driver board provided the fading lighting for the hidden room. The movement platform was built using gears cut on my X-Carve CNC mill.
3D Printed Arm Saw - Personal Project
This little arm-mounted prop packs a punch. I built it for a mad doctor costume. It includes a spinning “blade”, fog effects, sound, and lights. Because space was at a premium on a wearable prop like this, I designed a custom PCB to fit the control board into the main housing.
