Halloween is a big deal at 22Squared. It’s a time to let the employees’ kids have a safe place to go trick-or-treating and to put a smile on their faces. Oh, and there’s the competition between departments who can put on the best display.
Every year I try to apply my engineering and maker skills to whatever theme my department wants to do. It varies every year as you can see from the themes below.
Our wing of the office wanted to do a Disney Movies theme.
From Monsters Inc, I made some doors with working LED lights as well as 3D printed parts and made some scream/laugh canisters from toilet rolls.
For Coco, I made the white guitar from foam board with some 3D printed parts to complete the details. Finally, face paint to complete my outfit.
Our department decided we wanted to do a Wild Wild West theme. What better way to be interactive than a Nerf shooting gallery. 😁
My first go-to was LEGO to brainstorm how the mechanism would work. Then it’s off to the 3D printer for rapid prototyping. I must have gone through several designs.
The studio team did a great job designing and constructing the buildings of the Western town. Off to do some testing before the actual day.
Everyone was hooked on Stranger Things TV show, so naturally that was our theme for this year. What caught my eye was the alphabet light wall, so I had to figure out how to replicate that. Also the hand that reached out from inside the wall. Creepy!
The alphabet light wall effect was accomplished using LED light string connected to an Arduino. Had to learn C so I could program the Arduino board to “walk” the lights along the string to spell out “R”, “U”, “N”. That was fun.
The hand reaching out of the wall was accomplished using a sonar sensor, LEGO Mindstorm and some t-shirt cotton fabric.
