The creative engineers behind Rotten Kitten — Cory and Jeremy — have been making epic Halloween costumes for their children for the last four years. They brainstorm for months and start building once October rolls around. This year Cooper and Ziggy got to be Mad Max and Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. Cory and Jeremy used some cheap Power Wheels to make the base of the war rig and dressed the plastic vehicles up with cardboard, electronics, and paint. By the time they were done, the war rig actually moved and could be operated by remote-control iPhone app. Yeah, my Halloween costumes have never been this cool either.
Rotten Kitten lists all the tech details on their blog, but here’s a snippet:
Most parts were from other projects here, some came from Amazon, and others took 3 weeks shipping from China.
Based on a yellow Power Wheels jeep, with parts from a Barbie jeep. Both found cheap on craigslist.
Two Arduino Nano’s control the system; one for the main car, and a separate one to drive audio. Audio was causing some lag and we couldn’t have the local car controls unresponsive.
Running all 4 motors from both jeeps, using two PWM 5V motor controllers from eBay.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
