We finished up and installed the lightbar effect on Monday evening. This is the lighting device that is mounted near the garage door.

Here is the controller. It’s a Boarduino (Arduino compatable) on a breadboard. Power is supplied by a “wall wart” on a regular light timer. Five wires go up to the lightbar: Power (2) and Data (3).

At the lightbar, we have the A6276 LED Driver. You supply it with power, and then stream serial data to it. This allows you to control 16 LEDs independently with only three data lines. Since the lightbar is mounted near the garage door, and will only be up for a week, I didn’t bother waterproofing.

You can see in the above photo that I used 2″ “L” brackets to mount the 1×2 near the top of the garage door frame. We also added another strap (actually a piece of Erector set) in the middle, to prevent bowing.

Here is what the installed setup looks like:

In the front bedroom window we have to Peggy installed. This is a 625 10mm white LED array (25×25). Evelyn programmed ghost, pumpkin, and alien/boo! images. The Peggy cycles though them. It’s very effective at night. (It’s off and daytime in this photo.)

In the side bedroom window we have the Bat Sign, along with a rCube Talking Clock that has LED effects (we have the “Halloween” effects running — oranges, purples, flashes of white).

Here’s a shot of the front “picture” window during the day:

Some of the spotlights and LaserPod that “paint” the figures with light:

And a whole mess of wires to light everything up. Good thing this is only temporary!

We re-purposed an old Christmas popcorn container (about 12″ x 12″) for our candy bucket. Spray painted it black and then I (poorly) spray painted a bat using a paper stencil. I need to work on this technique, as I got too much bleeding/running. Good enough for this, though.

That about does it for effects and pieces. We’re also going to be setting up our “robot voice” pumpkin thing, along with our sound effects tower. (I need to do a video of the sound effects in action.) That stuff will get put out early Saturday, to prevent vandalism.

Also, I’d like to mention a really nice effect that our neighbor put up. She first put large “stick on” Halloween silhouettes on her front window. Then draped a series of orange “Christmas lights” about a foot behind. Finally, put a drape (old sheet) behind it all. It’s a very nice effect and can be done inexpensively. I’ll try and get a photo.

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