Los Alamos Arts Council does a yearly scarecrow contest, where businesses and individuals build scarecrows to decorate the lamp posts along Central Avenue in downtown Los Alamos. This year’s theme was “Movie Monsters”, and Lis thought it would be fun to do an entry for STEAM Lab. But her idea was relatively simple, so I had to jump in and make it much more complex.
Construction
We had an old trash can laying around, and Lis initially thought about making it into a Dalek from the Dr. Who series. Since the trash can already provides half the shape, the original idea was just to build a simple dome head for the top and call it done. But as I started to plan it out in my mind, I realized I had the time and supplies to take it further.
I started out with the trash can as the base, as can be seen here, and then I started looking around the workshop for supplies to build it out. I mounted that to a simple base made of 2x4s and spray painted black, and then I mocked up the shape of the front of the “skirt” with cardboard. A leftover piece of PVC pipe and a plunger worked perfectly as the start of the Dalek’s two weapons, and some rings cut from scrap plywood would finish out the torso nicely. Real Daleks don’t generally wear Australian hats, but I wanted something to visualize the shape of the head, and the hat did the job well.
From there, I started refining: I used the cardboard templates to cut the front skirt pieces out of cardboard, filled in gaps in the rings, and built a piece to hold the plunger and egg beater. I also had a bunch of metallic silver paint left over from a previous project, which made a good Dalek color. And I found some big foam balls that, when cut in half and painted black, made great dimples for the bottom half.
The final part that I built was the head, which is strips of EVA foam over a simple wood frame. I built the eye stalk from a piece of PVC pipe and a thrift store baseball that I cut 1/3 off of, which I then painted appropriate colors. With that, it was time to take it downtown!
The Final Product
We managed to grab a light pole that had power in its base, so we were able to add some interactivity to the final product too. Inside the trash can is a Raspberry Pi with a PIR motion sensor attached to a couple of its GPIO pins. The sensor is peeking out through a hole above the top dimple on the front, and it triggers the Pi to play Dalek sounds when somebody walks in front of it. Most of the time it just yells “EX-TERM-IN-ATE”, but there’s also a small random probability that it will yell “TRICK-OR-TREAT” instead.
This scarecrow was very popular, and won us first place in the contest!