Home of the Week: The Ultimate Automated Halloween Decorations: See How A DIYer Put It All Together

It’s Halloween night and the trick-or-treaters are out in full force. How do you entice candy seekers to visit your house? Or maybe you turn off all the lights to keep them away. Ashu Gholkar of Moorpark, Calif., created a fantastic automated Halloween display that appeals to everyone—it’s both gentle and welcoming for young kids who spook easily and off the rails scary for older kids who want nothing more than a good fright.

“I love Halloween,” Ashu says. “I have always decorated for it, but decided last year to make it more interactive. I really wanted to build a haunted house, but was concerned about liability.

The alternative was to turn his own home into a quasi-haunted house—accomplished by the integration of several pieces of smart home technology.

Get more smart Halloween decorating ideas here

Ashu was able to create multiple Halloween scenes by integrating several smart home devices and programming a Tasker mobile app to offer trick-or-treaters the opportunity to select a level of scariness via an Android tablet mounted near the walkway to his house. Colored Philips Hue lights, animated decorations, video projectors, fog machine, and audio combine to evoke a variety of different Halloween scenes. And the most amazing part: Ashu designed, installed, and programmed the entire setup on his own. It’s the ultimate DIY Halloween display. Here’s how he did it:

1. Ashu built a stand for the tablet that locks into place to make it difficult to steal. The stand is mounted to the edge of the property next to the sidewalk and has built-in power and speakers.
2. A video projector simulates fire and projects Halloween figures on the wall of the porch.
3. Another video projector located in an upstairs bedroom is connected to an old Google Nexus Player running Kodi to display a few videos from Youtube and AtmosFX on a loop onto a screen hung against a window.
4. Two hanging decorations by the porch are designed to shake when they hear sound. These battery-driven items were converted to line power and plugged into Belkin Wemo outlets so they could be turned on or off from the tablet.
5. Three main modes were programmed into the tablet by using Home Assistant software running on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer. These were choreographed into scenes using the Android Tasker app. All of the commands are sent directly from the app to a SmartThings home control that transfers the commands to the appropriate smart devices.

Here are the 3 different Halloween scenes – starting with the spookiest

1. Normal Mode

• Video projector displays a loop of spooky videos without sound
• All the lights illuminate, include the eyes of ghost and ghoul decorations
• Fog machine and strobe lights activate
• Philips Hue bulbs and strip lights rotate between the colors of blue, purple and red

 

2. Show Mode

• Philips Hue lights turn on in a red color—all other lights stay off
• Fog machine and strobe lights stay off
• Projector plays a spooky video
• The Halloween scene returns to normal mode after the video plays

3. Less Scary Mode

• Philips Hue bulbs and strip turn on in a white color—all other lights stay off
• Fog machine and strobe lights stay off
• Projector displays a static image of a pumpkin
• The Halloween scene return to normal mode with the option to add 10 seconds

Other tablet options allow visitors to customize the display even more—and issue a gentle warning to users to leave the tablet where it is.

• Scare someone: The tablet sends a command to the Wemo switches to turn on the dancing decorations for 5 seconds. If you press the command again, it plays a scary video on the screen of the tablet. The idea is that someone can try to scare another person as they walk to the door, but if they try it again, they scare themselves.
• Thinking about stealing me: This displays a screen stating how “crappy” the tablet is and that it’s NOT an iPad. It also serves as a plea to not ruin Halloween for others.

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