Welcome, foolish mortals, to another year of haunted hacks from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine. These brutal builds are sure to send a chill down your spine and ‘liven up’ even the putrid parties of the undead.

This year we’re focusing on the tiny Raspberry Pi Pico as the dark driver of your foul festivities – don’t be fooled by its small stature, though; it too can produce supernatural spooks to scare your gruesome guests. So start practising your programming sorcery – the witching hour awaits…

Simple spooky Pico hacks

At this time of year, you’re sure to find a lot of Halloween tat – excuse us – icky items of terror in your local supermarket or hardware store. Some of them may even be very cool (and very reasonably priced), but could use something… a little extra.

While there are plenty of projects with servos and sensors and HaaS (Halloween-as-a-Service, natch), the quickest way to spruce up these fiendish finds is simply with some lighting upgrades from our friends at Pimoroni.

Pico Unicorn Pack

An LED strip with buttons that is barely bigger than a Raspberry Pi Pico, these programmable lights can be easily slipped inside decorations and programmed with greens, oranges, and purples to give off a Halloween vibe. You need to provide a Pico yourself, but programming is very easy.

Wireless Plasma Kit

This lighting kit includes at the very least a strip of programmable LEDs and a Plasma 2350 W (basically a custom Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W designed to control LEDs), perfect for creating a custom lighting scheme for any Halloween prop. Pimoroni also sells a version that comes with a skull bottle to put the lights in – Dan Aykroyd not included – as a quick Halloween decoration in itself.

Dastardly DIY decorations

Pico pumpkins

Not dissimilar to what we mentioned on the previous page about upgrading some decorations with simple lighting, although the lights in these jack-o’-lanterns are much more advanced with LED matrices used to create eyes. You’ll also need to carve the pumpkin yourself, which means you don’t have to do a traditional spooky face or even normal eyes to go in them.

Spooky Scary Skeleton

Kevin McAleer makes a lot of great robots over at kevsrobots.com and he created this ‘bare bones’ robot (get it?) for Halloween one year. It’s made up of 3D printed parts and has ultrasonic sensors, eye-shaped sensors usually used to detect distance, to sense when someone is in front of it. When it detects movement, it starts moving its mouth and eyebrows.

Bag o’ Bones

The bag o’ bones is a decoration that maker 314Reactor found in a Sainsbury’s supermarket. He upgraded it with a PIR motion sensor, various motors, and even a speaker so that any unsuspecting passers-by would be scared sockless by the suddenly writhing bones that begins to play Toccata and Fugue in D minor – which most folks will know as the cliché spooky organ music.

Possessed Portrait

We cannot tell a lie; this portrait of George Washington following you around the room with his eyes is very creepy. Usually for a project like this, folks would make use of computer vision to track faces; however, this one uses ultrasonic sensors, much like the skull robot. The servos actually just move a bit of card around behind the picture – very low-tech but very effective.

Issue 170 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine is out NOW!

This article appeared in issue 170 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, which you can access online. You can also subscribe to the print version of our magazine. Not only do we deliver worldwide, but those who sign up to the six- or twelve-month print subscription will receive a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W!

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