jebt2921 Posted November 1, 2019 Share Posted November 1, 2019 Well it’s that time of year where the doorbell and front door lock gets more work and C4 notifications than it does the rest of the year combined (yes I know I could turn notifications off). What are your favorite and creative automations for Halloween to make for some fun at the front of the house any maybe scare some kids? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk ERDrPC 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyanE Posted November 1, 2019 Share Posted November 1, 2019 This is pretty much the same as I did last year, except I wrapped LEDs around the two columns this year. You can't really hear the music playing or the scary announcement sounds very well in the first video, but you can on the pumpkin one. Features: Tidal Halloween playlist Smoke / 'Fire' Pumpkin 9 random announcements (screaming, thunder, creepy laughter, etc.) LED lighting with lightning feature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUDeh5mZgbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4On-iPEi1Y RyanE Time2Jet and natejon 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tokead Posted November 1, 2019 Share Posted November 1, 2019 Cool. I like the led lights lightening feature. How did you do that?Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyanE Posted November 1, 2019 Share Posted November 1, 2019 The hardware for the LEDs is some hardware I made (boards, layout, etc.), that uses the ESP8266 Wifi microcontroller and some MOSFETs to PWM the LED outputs. After that, I created the firmware (Lightning is built into the firmware, it'd be too slow to do that via C4 programming), and then created a driver for Control4. I use the same modules in my kitchen for over/under kitchen LEDs, but rarely use the lightning mode... After building circuit boards and 3D printing cases for my LED controllers, I found that you could buy basically the same thing from China for about $10 each... They even worked with my firmware, if I changed the pinouts a bit: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32833287206.html All the house lighting is controlled via Control4, the motion sensor and announcements and streaming audio are all Control4, and an Z2IO is used to press the button on a repeating timer for the fog generator (it has to heat up for a while before it'll do fog, so it works best to hit the button every 20 seconds or so, for 2-3 seconds). The first year I did this, I used the IR controllers that come with many LED lights and a Global Cache Wifi2IR (you could use a Z2IR now)... It worked OK, but the lightning wasn't great. Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018ZJL0MO/ The fog pumpkin was some kind of instructable, mostly just bought the pumpkin, bought the fog machine, used PVC from the fog machine to the box under the pumpkin, and used a rotating LED display (Gemmy 966237 LED Outdoor Fire and Ice Lightshow, Orange) for the pumpkin lighting. RyanE Tokead 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KWD Posted November 1, 2019 Share Posted November 1, 2019 Mind sharing the firmware/driver? Wanted to do something like this but wasn't sure of the best route. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyanE Posted November 1, 2019 Share Posted November 1, 2019 9 minutes ago, KWD said: Mind sharing the firmware/driver? Wanted to do something like this but wasn't sure of the best route. I'm not going to say this is the 'best route' by any means. The code I've had up on github for quite a while, I just added the driver to the repository. https://github.com/RyanBErickson/RGBWiFi The code is pretty rough, could use some more work, you're welcome to fork it and make any improvements. There's no support offered, obviously. RyanE ecschnei 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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