Geischt

One day my boy came to me and stated that his cardboard monster should scare
his little brother. He specified that the robot shall appear when someone makes
noise and dissapear when it is quite.

Aldough I did not like the "scare the little brother" part of his motivation I sat down
with him to outline this new robot a bit more.

Actually I wanted to compete in this challenge so I got myself into this making and
supported the kid and his creativity.

A few minutes later we had a prototype that showed the basic principle of this ghost.

After a bit more elaboration and prototyping there arise this map that showed where
eyes, mouth and eyebrows are placed and how far the distances from the
nice to the bad face were.

So this results got transfered to a A4 paper sheet and became the measurement
base of this ghost robot. 

After a lot of cutting and exploring this ghost started to look like one. Playing around
with it using light and no-light this shadow play got visible. The ghosts face got very
fuzzy. Kind of uncertainity about the outlines. This fuzzy effect was 100% ghosty.  

Shadow. That is it. Fuzzy outlines. Not clear where the body starts and where it ends.

Shadow is all we need here to get the effect. Nice finding. Great ghost-look. 

An old trashed music box that almost landed in the garbage got reused as the cave
of the ghost. 

Inside the box there is enough space to insert the cardboard layers, the light
and the other electronics. The two mini makers helped a bit...

After some weeks we continued this build and added some lights. Using a transistor
and Arduino to switch on/off. 

Our table got turned into a robot lab again... and my mini maker experimented with 
lights and DC motors while I soldered the LEDs. 

Unfortunately the shadow effect got lost a bit. In the picture below the upper image
shows the mouth without paper cover. Clear and only a bit fuzzy outlines.
The image below shows the mouth covered with a white sheet of paper. The teeth
are almost not visible. So further testing needs to be done. 

Well then... more elaboration and electronics are next.