I've Got My Eye on You

Halloween is a special time of year for electronics hobbyists that want to show off their skills. It’s not like the whole neighborhood shows up to your front door to marvel at your creations every day, after all! So many hardware hackers spend weeks (or months!) preparing all sorts of spooky projects to scare unsuspecting little ghouls that thought they were just going to get an easy score of candy at their house. Muahahaha!

Engineer Kath Korevec was certainly not going to let these little beasts get away without a fright this year. To send them running away in terror, Korevec built a supremely spooky flip-disc display for installation in a front window. This unique display forms an evil eye that tracks every movement of passersby, never letting them be free of its wicked grasp.

The display was constructed from a set of 24 tiled seven-segment flip-digit panels. A camera captures images of those foolish enough to approach the all-knowing eye, and the images are processed by a YOLOv8 object detection algorithm that recognizes humans, ghouls, zombies, and mummies. A Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer determines where these creatures are, then redraws the image on the flip-digit display to give them a good scare.

The build details are a bit scant, but Korevec recently built a similar flip-disc display that was well documented, so you can check that out if you need some guidance. It is too late to put one of these together for this year, but you have an entire year to get ready for next Halloween. Or rather, eleven months to procrastinate and one month to rush it to completion. Happy hacking!