I was excited when the Adafruit MONSTER M4SK was announced, because for years I've wanted to make an interactive skull as a Halloween prop - and now there's a project board custom-made to support that!

There are lots of cheesy Halloween decorations out there. That's fine. But I wanted to build something with a bit of subtlety to it, that might attract random Halloween visitors into a memorably creepy interaction rather than just make noise or flash.

This guide is the beginnings of the guts of that project. It modifies the MONSTER M4SK so that its eyes, instead of looking around randomly, track a person in front of them, following their face as it moves.

Disclaimers

This design is cheap and cheerful, using an infrared (IR) grid sensor and a simple heuristic to figure out where the human is. There are other approaches using more expensive sensors and processors that might work better.

In particular, this is designed to work outdoors on a cool night. That means the infrared noise floor should be low, and "hot spots" should correspond with uncovered parts of humans, like faces. If you take it into a warm environment, with lots of people around, it may glance around rapidly instead of following the nearest face, and if you put it in front of a bonfire, it may not even notice the humans at all (to be fair, that's how I often react in both of those situations too).

Also, you'll need some way to mount the parts for display - in a creature, mask, pumpkin, skull, scarecrow, or whatever. I plan to share my skull model for 3D printing when it's done, but it's not done yet.

Parts List

The parts needed for this project:

Optional Parts

You'll also need something to mount the components in, and a way to power them. Some quick options: