Gadgetory

hey i'm donald bell today i'm going to show you how to take ordinary halloween decorations and bring them to life with some music and animation to do this I've got some plug-in Halloween decorations like this strobe light and a spooky light-up skull and some green lights I also have some plain household extension cords some wire strippers a momentary switch some cheap speakers and some Halloween music and sound effects on my iPod but the key to this whole thing is this it's a relay switch sequencer also known as a key banger this one's the monster guts nerve center you can find it online for about $70 we're gonna plug in our Halloween decorations here on the back and then use the interface to make a sequence of them turning on and off on command and it's going to be awesome the first step is to hook up the connections on the back of the nerve center these are two basic relay switches they're like the light switches in your home only they're connected to a little computer inside here that automatically switches them on and off to make this easy we're gonna hook these up to extension cords so for that to work I've got to graph this connector onto the extension cord so that I can plug it into the nerve center first we're gonna make sure our cord is not connected to a socket yet I'll use a screwdriver to split the cord near the socket end then I'll make a cut on one side doesn't matter which one next I'll expose about a quarter inch of the copper from the cut section of the wire now you can give this a twist and run it right into the relay block and screw it down but for a more durable solution I soldered the tips here to prevent the wire from fraying so now you've got two pieces of cable but three places to connect so what gives well one side goes to the con on the far left then depending on what effect you want the other side can go to the normally open connection to turn things on or normally closed to turn things off in this case we're going with normally open which means that anything I plug in here by default is gonna be turned off one of these connections will give you one thing that you can blink on and off but there are two on here that you can use independently so why not go all out and hook up two extension cords all right so we've got our two extension cords hooked up to the nerve center now I'm gonna plug in our decorations I'll plug in the strobe light over here on this guy and plug in our skull and our green lights and to the other cable alright now we still need to get power to the extension cords the nerve center is not actually providing power to these cables so we have to plug them in now don't be afraid hopefully you've made your connections correctly we're also gonna plug in the nerve center finally alright so everything's got power let's move on to adding some music or sound effects I've got some spooky music here on my iPod the nerve center came with this mini jack cable to connect these together so that I can record my sounds directly into the controller I'll plug in my iPod here using the cable hit the menu button one time so that it reads ES one hit the start button and hit play on my iPod I can record up to two minutes of music but mostly I'm just going for shock value here so I'll fade out my iPod after a few seconds alright to hear it back we're gonna press the menu button again so that it reads AC one we're gonna plug in some passive speakers into the speaker output jack on the front here now when I press play we're gonna hear the music come out we like what we hear we can move on to the next step which is going to be programming the relay switches that control the decorations now the term keeping and got its name because we are literally sequencing these actions in real time by banging on these keys this Keys gonna operate whatever is plugged into this cable and this Keys gonna operate whatever is plugged into this one so we're gonna hit start here the music now when we're all done we'll hit the same button to stop things we're all set all right now to preview everything you've done hit the menu button one more time so we see a p1 then hit the start button it's working the music's playing the lights are blinking everything seems extremely awesome I can hit the stop button and everything's gonna stop there it goes now if I didn't like it if I wanted to redo the music or redo the lights I could go yeah I could use the Menu button to go back to that particular menu and I can rerecord and keep moving on but I'm pretty happy with that so I'm gonna hit the menu button a couple times until I see SC one which is going to be the live mode for this controller now if we controlled the whole thing from the nerve center that would be pretty cool but not that great for surprising people instead the nerve center gives you a trigger input on the front you can hook up to a pressure-sensitive door mat or a home security sensor but in this case we're gonna hook it up to a momentary switch this deluxe one comes from monster guts but I also have a few that I wired up myself for just a few bucks you're gonna hook the ends of the wire to the far ends of the block here on the front we're gonna plug the block back into the front and now when I press this button everything should activate right all systems go all right so that's one cool way for taking your Halloween decorations up a notch this year there's a how-to cnet.com for more Halloween tips and tricks you can also subscribe to my updates on facebook for cnet.com you