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Haunt your own house

Make scary Halloween stories even more terrifying by adding ghoulish special effects

鈥淚 love telling scary stories, but my tales don鈥檛 spook my children like they used to,鈥� says Evelyn Tenshens. 鈥淚s there a techie way to give them a fright this Halloween, other than hiding their iPads?鈥�

You can鈥檛 beat a good scare. One easy way to amp up the adrenaline in your storytelling is by haunting your own house.

The key is to create spooky accompaniments to your words. For that, you need a trigger. A concealed remote was my first thought, but you are likely to be spotted pushing buttons. The words themselves would make the best trigger.

To achieve this, I took my programmable Arduino circuit board and clipped on a device called 1Sheeld. This lets me control Arduino over Bluetooth via the sensors in my phone. It offers a shortcut to voice recognition, which is something my phone is smart enough to do already. A few lines of code later, my Arduino was ready to make mischief when it heard a preprogrammed magic word.

Next, the props: anything as long as they have a way to talk wirelessly to the Arduino. This either means being connected to the internet, or being wired to a board that is.

For example, I could have my smart lights flash when I say the word 鈥渓ightning鈥�, or I could wire a speaker to a Wi-Fi board for ghoulish voices on cue.

Of course, choosing the right trigger words is important. If you鈥檙e speaking of a dark and stormy night, 鈥渄ark鈥� is a tempting choice 鈥� but a wayward remark about dark chocolate could spoil the surprise. Even safer bets like 鈥減lunged鈥� into darkness could result in a downpour of plastic spiders during a chat about DIY. At least that would be shocking.

But choose overly obscure keywords and listeners might figure out the ruse. Keep them guessing by making some triggers more complicated.

Have sensors lying in wait and prime them to activate after the trigger word. Perhaps a motion sensor in a doorway, so the next person to leave the room after you say 鈥減umpkin鈥� gets a face full of pumpkin pie, or saying 鈥渕y smartphone died in this room鈥� switches off the router. That last one was enough to strike fear into the hearts of my millennial friends.

• Let us solve your domestic trifles. No problem is too small for our resident tech wizards. Tell us what鈥檚 bothering you and we鈥檒l build a fix.