Last year I wanted to put together a Halloween display emulating my favorite Disneyland/world ride of all time. Originally this was just going to be four heads on a table with the Haunted Mansion’s “Grim Grinning Ghosts” playing on a loop. But that all changed after I picked up my first Arduino UNO.
After I started learning to program my Ardunio this evolved into a photocell actuated video “on demand” Halloween display. I used an example I found on Arkadian.eu to control a Dell Mini 9 netbook running AutoHotKey. When the photocell switch is tripped the Arduino sends a serial message to the Dell laptop which is converted to a keystroke by AAC Keys which in turn triggers the below AutoHotKey Script and finally plays back using VLC. The “AAC Keys” could probably be replaced by setting up your Arduino as a USB HID but at the time this was all a foreign language to me.
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