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.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
