Day 50- Remote scare deployment- Part 1

Welcome ghouls! It's now day 50! We get a little anxious when the school year starts as that means it's almost October....especially when you start seeing the Halloween decorations come out. Anyway, as things get further along we start to finalize our 'event planning'. How, when and where do the actual 'scares' happen? As an amateur hauntmaster in your average community, I don't have the luxury of dedicated actors who are as crazy into this whole thing as we are. This year Halloween is on a Sunday which is still a 'school night', so people are either going to school or going to work the next day. I'm lucky if I get a few volunteers to help out at the last minute. They are still critically important but a key component for a haunt like this is triggering light and sound at the precise instant of time to maximize the scare effect. There are 2 ways this is done. One method is through the use of some triggering device. Over the years I have realized that in an effective haunt, darkness is your friend. Therefore light activated or motion activated sensors are useless. Infrared sensors are not reliable as most of the time they will trigger randomly since IR radiation can come from a variety of sources. In my opinion, the most reproducible, reliable sensor in a dark venue is the mat sensor, i.e. pressure. We will get into that later. For now I want to discuss the other method, which is manual activation of light and sound using some type of switch. This is done in combination with night vision monitoring (shown in the last post). One option for remote switching on and off is a system called X10. This has been around for years. It's the same kind of thing some people use to turn on their coffee remotely, or other appliances. Verrrry simple. You can google X10 and it's the first thing that comes up. A starter kit will cost around $40. It comes with a transceiver that plugs into an outlet and a remote control pad. You can add other 'modules' to the system depending on your set-up. Look at the image above. These show the transceiver on the left and 2 other modules, with the remote at far right. All you do is set the the transceiver dial to 'A', plug it into an outlet, then plug the device into the transceiver. The transceiver is #1 on the remote by default. If you add additional modules, these will be 2,3 etc. These are set-up the same way. Set each module to 'A' on the bottom dial and number 2 or 3 etc on the top dial, plug the module into the outlet, then plug the device into the module. Notice one module says 'lamp' and the other says 'appliance'. They are made to handle different degrees of wattage, but for the purposes of the average garage haunt, there isn't going to be a significant amount per module, so it probably isn't critical which one you use (I think the lamp one is cheaper). However, if you need to set off a whole power strip worth of electrical devices at once, use the appliance module.
I have included a couple of video demos as well.