Hot or Not? Gertrude Never Made it to the Party.
I built this beauty for her debut at the ITP Haunted House on the Thursday before Halloween. She never quite made it though.
I had built and prepped a mechanism that enabled her to turn around when someone came near. A proximity sensor to gauge distance was wired to the Arduino, which would control a servo motor I had rigged to spin Gertrude on a little axial platform. The servo’s arm, a makeshift propeller I lengthened with the use of masonite, was connected to a steel rod that fastened to the disc of the platform. Each time someone came a certain distance, the arm would rotate 180 degrees, turning Gertrude around. From this, I wanted to include a high powered fan and strobe lights that would activate after about five seconds, simultaneously blowing her floppy hair up and revealing her light in strobe. She would greet the visitor with…a…smile.
I gave up on the fan pretty early on, as I don’t think I could have found one powerful and discreet enough to use. I focused instead on the strobe aspect of this reveal. While shopping the Blue Light Special at Kmart a week prior, I came across a Halloween effect (with sound and proximity sensors of its own) that emitted creepy sounds and activated a string of strobe lights. The perfect accoutrement for dear Gertrude.
So it took me a bit to get everything working. For one, the platform I had glued epoxied glued glued kept freeing itself from the metal rod. I instead built another platform out of better, harder wood. This sort of worked. It turned out that Gertrude was not as light as I thought she was. So not only was the platform freeing itself, the servo motor was struggling to turn her around.
Then, upon testing the strobe lights and the sound effects, the speaker gave out. I was fine with no sounds, but the strobes had to work. With a little fine tuning of my code, I finally got everything working, literally, with minutes to go before the Haunted House was to be open. And then…
…she totally died! The code would not work without my computer connected to it. I tried several power adapters in hopes of having her run not off of my computer (due to the heightened security from recent thefts on the floor!). But anytime I plugged her in, her movements bugged out- she would convulse in a non-scary way, she wouldn’t rotate or would only partially rotate.
In the end, I had her on display, just sitting next to the pizza boxes, trying to as social as she could be. The moral of the story,…I would be a horrible father.
