Ask HN: Good resources for DIY-ish animatronic kits for Halloween?

1 xrd 0 9/7/2025, 12:57:18 PM

Does anyone know of good resources to make your own animatronic Halloween displays?

I'm a software engineer, and not skilled in hardware per se.

I would love to make some things together with my kids. For reference, they are 8, 10, 12 and VERY smart and they use Ubuntu as their desktop computers and can use flatpak from the command line. Not that I am bragging....

And, I would love to NOT spent $400 on just a single ridiculous junky thing from Lowes, and do that for multiple things. My budget is definitely tiny and the journey of building and troubleshooting is what I want for the kids, not necessarily a finished perfect project.

I found this site and it looks interesting but I am unsure how well this would work for someone like me and whether I would be able to get it working. The site says "Only 54 days until Halloween!"

https://www.frightprops.com/pneumatics.html

If anyone knows of good projects on GitHub, please let me know?

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Ask HN: Good resources for DIY-ish animatronic kits for Halloween?

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