Some engineering and science links for this Halloween:

Scientist Trains AI To Create Brilliantly Ludicrous “Sexy” Halloween Costume Ideas article shows what happens when you use AI to design a Halloween costume.

10 Scary True Stories from Engineering History presents you scary experiments like resurrecting the dead, mind control, radiation gone wrong, and man-eating robots, we’ve rounded up 10 of history’s creepiest true tales of science and engineering gone wrong.

What Are Americans Most Afraid Of In 2018?

A Skull-Shaped ‘Dead Comet’ Will Zoom Past Earth This Halloween

Here are some hardware hacking related links for this Halloween:

Fake Walkie-Talkie for Fake Ghost Tours article show a fake walkie-talkie project that is a GPS enabled audio player where comedy meets tourism.

3D Printing, Halloween Style shows how you can 3D print a scary pumpkin decoration.

Animatronic Browser-Controlled Singing Jack-O’-Lanterns article shows an excellent trio of DIY pumpkins that “sing” along with classic Halloween songs like “Monster Mash” or whatever tune you program into it.

Scary Pumpkin with motion detector and movements! article shows a pumkin with sensor which detects movement, then there’s the smart LED strip and also added servo motor to scare even more neighbors. All the functions can be controlled by MQTT in node-red for example

Your Jack-O’-Lantern May Look Cool, but Can It Hover? article presents how you can turn your pumpkin into a hovercraft.

Adafruit’s HalloWing Skull-Shaped Dev Board Is Optimized for Halloween Project

LEGO Candy Launcher —Perfect Last-Minute Halloween Build?

Unbelievable PR stunt:

In what just might be the wildest thing anyone has ever built with Lego, the company behind the bricks has built a full-size, drivable model of the Bugatti Chiron supercar.

Seriously.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/build-for-real
With LEGO® Technic we like to state that you build for real. And to prove this is more than just a slogan, we decided to build a car. But not just any car. Our one would be a true 1:1 copy of the magnificent Bugatti Chiron, built from LEGO Technic elements.

This is a really cool LEGO project.
The Brothers Brick contributor Bre Burns hits it out of the nostalgia ballpark with a fully functional LEGO pinball machine called “Benny’s Spaceship Adventure.” She spent several months perfecting the design with over 15,000 LEGO bricks, including LEGO Mindstorms NXT programmable bricks.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5BngfWLsFVs

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0AwK8O9Nos0

The first Lego pieces made from plant-based plastic sourced go on sale this year, the company has announced.

Production has begun on a range of Lego botanical elements or pieces such as leaves, bushes and trees, made entirely from polyethylene (made with ethanol extracted from sugar cane material). They will start appearing in Lego box sets with bricks and mini-figures later this year.

Lego bricks have been traditionally made with a strong, oil-based plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) since 1963. Lego boasts of the durability of its bricks.

The little building blocks first appeared 60 years ago. Since it was patented on January 28, 1958, fans young and old have been building Lego creations.

This is an interesting story that combines AI and LEGO.

Even second-hand Lego isn’t cheap. Bulk unsorted Lego sells for roughly €10 per kilogram (about US $11/kg), boxed sets go for €40/kg, and collections of rare parts and Lego Technic pieces much more.

Consequently, there exists a cottage industry of people who buy new sets and bulk Lego and manually sort all the pieces into more valuable groupings.
The biggest challenge of course was identification.

The IR Remote Control sends infrared light messages to the IR Receiver much like a television remote sends a signal to a TV. The Power Functions IR System has 4 channels. On the Power Functions IR Remote Control and IR Receiver you have a channel selector switch.

Protocol:

See LEGO_Power_Functions_RC_v120.pdf for  information on the IR signals used to control LEGO creations: LEGO Power Functions RC Protocol The payload is: 1 toggle bit, 1 escape bit, 2 bits for channel switch, 1 bit for address, 3 bits for mode and 4 bits for various data depending on mode (maximum message length 16 ms). When a button is pressed or released on the transmitter the message is sent. Five exactly matching messages (if no other buttons are pressed or released) are sent.

Controlling LEGO power function system with Arduino:

GitHub – jurriaan/Arduino-PowerFunctions: Lego Power Functions Infrared Control for Arduino is a Arduino Lego Power Functions Library. It allows you to easily generate same IR signal that LEGO power function remote controller sends.

Arduino and LEGO® Power Functions – Hackster.io article describes a project that involves a LEGO Train that was controller by an Arduino.

There is Arduino and LEGO® Power Functions project for controlling a LEGO Train with Arduino and LEGO® Power Functions.

First attempt at driving a train! web page is a good tutorial how to start controlling LEGO trains with Arduino.

Here is some code (base on example from First attempt at driving a train! page) I successfully used to send control signals to LEGO train from Arduino with IR LED (needs legopowerfunctions library to be installed). This with make the train go forward for 5 seconds, stops for 1 seconds, goes backwards for 5 seconds. stops for 1 second and starts all over again:

#include <legopowerfunctions.h>
// IR led on port 13
void setup(){
LEGOPowerFunctions lego(13);
}

void loop(){
lego.SingleOutput(0, PWM_FWD4, RED, CH2);
delay(5000);
lego.SingleOutput(0, PWM_FLT, RED, CH2);
delay(1000);
lego.SingleOutput(0, PWM_REV4, RED, CH2);
delay(5000);
lego.SingleOutput(0, PWM_FLT, RED, CH2);
delay(1000);
}

The hardware needed is same as described in First attempt at driving a train! page:

Interesting idea.

This looks to be a very funny LEGO + Arduino robotics project.