We live in Jetsons Future of ubiquitous automation, in which the most trivial of human tasks has a machine to take the work out of it. Take Halloween candy for example, why the effort to do it by hand when a machine can take the burden? [Christian] is here to show us the way with the Halloween Candy Monster. It’s a cardboard monster ehad that delivers candy when you pinch its nose, but it’s a little more than that.
Behind the scenes, there’s an ESP32 running the show, with the sweetness dispensed by a stepper motor with a finger wheel. An IR break beam detects candy dispensing, and an array of flashing lights and sounds completes the celebration. It’s a little fun, but with more substance than meets the eye at first. Everything is sitting in a GitHub repository, you should take a look.
Halloween comes once a year though, and so we only have a few days to show off these hacks. Oddly, this is not the first candy dispenser we’ve brought you.