With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the 2023 Halloween Hackfest.
For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.
First Prize: Flying Ghost
Halloween offers a rare opportunity to not only take your creations out into the world, but to terrorize passerby without consequence. You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of that spirit, no pun intended, than the Flying Ghost created by [Scott Duckworth].
We’ve seen various RC aircraft get dressed up for the holiday in the past, but this example is a bit different. Rather than build his ghost around a free-flying rotorcraft, [Scott] suspended his haunter from a cable system that was connected to a trio of beefy winches that could be controlled by a central microcontroller using RF24L01+ modules. With a sprinkle of trilateration, the system was able to convert the length of line in each winch into a 3D position over the street. After the sun goes gown, the result is an illuminated ghost that can swoop over the heads of trick-or-treaters in silence with no obvious means of propulsion.
