Pirate Cannonades for 2009 are working!

**Nephilim** · 10-25-2009,06:01 PM

Howdy -

"Carnival of Souls" is adopting a pirate theme for 2009, and we're hard at work putting together the walkthrough haunt. In the finale for the haunt, visitors board the ruined hull of the "Flying Dutchman" ship, and under the command of an undead pirate captain, man the four cannonades on the front of the ship as they sail to skull island to seek the cursed treasure of Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Here are some photos of the main piece of construction, four cannonades my brother built for us:

What you see here are lengths of PVC connected and capped with turned wooden details. The boxes underneath house the main mechanism: four USB steering wheel controllers. The boxes will be mounted to a wooden platform in the garage, and set so that they can turn on casters. Wooden stoppers restrict the angle to which they can be turned.

As the cannons turn, they turn the steering wheel of the controller, allowing us to read the direction the cannons are aimed. The plungers at the back of the cannons rest on the accelerator pedals of the USB controller, so we can read when the visitor slaps down the plunger to fire a cannon. You can see the ends of the USB controllers coming out the front of the cannons in the photos.

The four cannon controllers will be connected to a Mac laptop that will be used to project a virtual 3D game onto a 10" screen we're hanging in the garage. When the visitors fire the cannon, it reads the angle the cannon is at, and fires a virtual cannonball into a 3D scene, where they will be shooting at pirate ships, sea monsters, etc. as targets.

We still have a lot of work to do before the big night, but this was the biggest piece of new engineering we needed to get into place, and it's working! I can't wait to see the kids manning these cannons!