How’s Terrorform doing these days? I see you still got the ol’
ScareBox up there. That’s like a soundboard trigger/interface, right? I think I know someone who could use one of those.
Halloween is right around the corner...
TerrorForm was one of those "you miss every shot that you don't take" endeavors. Had a blast trying to get it up and running with a good friend of mine. Ultimately, we were unable to secure what I've come to understand is one of the most valuable, and most difficult to obtain assets necessary to really get something off the ground: time. Between my buddy having a full time (although mostly remote) job, my engagement with the coin shop, working on my MBA, Mrs. V being pregnant with our fifth, and homeschooling the others, the "end" of the business ultimately culminated with the death of my father in 2018. I was the administrator of his estate, and with all of his private property being 500 miles from me...you get the picture.
We love Halloween (second only to Christmas) in the Vickers household. The ScareBox was born from a need to have a triggered digital media player which had more options and cost less than what was available on the market at the time. We developed it using a Raspberry Pi 3, as a base, designed and mass-produced a few thousand custom HATs made up and about 100 printed cases, and remotes. Digital haunting/decorating was really popular at the time (AtmosFX, puts out the best digital product, IMO), but the hardware available to best utilize the media products available was sub-standard unless you wanted to drop $500+, and even then, that stuff really only triggered digital media, required specific triggers, and didn't do anything else. Most of the market was still using DVD players with triggers to just play one file when triggered.
The ScareBox boots into a customized GUI that loads a menu of digital audio/video files in almost any format, (reading from a thumb drive) and gives the user several options to utilize those files for digital haunting/decorating. The simplest of these is simply to play one or multiple files randomly or in a specific order, looped or single play, with no trigger. Just choose the files and they will start playing.
The most popular function would be to chose one or more files that would play randomly or in order only when triggered. The HATs we developed facilitated a universal trigger adapter. Pressure mat, button, motion sensor, IR receiver, radio signal...etc. Any switch on the market, powered or unpowered, could be adapted...whether or not someone bought our triggers, which we were going to offer just for people who might be afraid to splice a few wires. Effect example that's pretty common: you're walking by a mirror, there's a pressure sensor under a rug, you step on it and a jump-scare image pops up on the mirror, which is really just a TV hiding behind some security plexiglass.
We also included an "ambient" function, where you could have one file playing in loop, and then the trigger would set off a different file. Use: creepy background music on loop distracts the "target" and when the switch is triggered the jump scare happens.
We debuted the product at the Rocklin Mini Maker's Faire, and set up a custom "Haunted Hallway" (I believe the build is documented on the TerrorForm website).
The problems: time/expense to develop a customized hardware at a lower price. The Pi had the power we needed to adequately play media files, but ultimately was like using a flat bed tow-truck to move a tricycle. The plan was that ultimately new hardware could be developed to strip down the unnecessary hardware components. The logo-printed microSD cards we got from a producer in China suffer some kind of signal degradation after a few months. Almost every unit that I've unpacked after we boxed up the original 30 has had to get a brand new card with the GUI re-written. Not long into our development, AtmosFX started selling a unit very similar to ours (albeit with less options in the GUI, and using only a built-in motion sensor). It just wasn't meant to be...but we had a blast doing it.
