November 20th, 2023
My wife decided that it would be nice to give me a new gargoyle for my 73rd birthday. I got it in June and set to work planning and building the system.
The first task was to imbed the red LEDs into his eyes. This, it turned out, was a far more difficult task than I expected. I bought some supposedly “super-bright” red LEDs from Amazon, but they turned out to be normal LEDs with lenses that focused their light in a narrow band. I should have tossed them and started over with better LEDs, but I thought I could accommodate the LEDs by pointing them carefully. I won’t drag through the many efforts I made to get them pointed correctly. I failed. So I went back to Amazon and searched some more and found a much better set of really bright red LEDs. I glued those into the gargoyle’s eyes and ran the lines down through the hollow interior of the gargoyle to a hole I cut in its bottom.
Next I had to program an Arduino computer to control the eyes. Here’s what the computer looks like:
It took just five wires to hook up everything: +5V, ground, right eye, left eye, and sensor input (more on that later).
All this took up much of June. Then I went to work building the platform on which the gargoyle would perch. Here’s the final result:
That’s four vertical posts with five horizontal crosspieces. Each vertical post is 16 feet high and set in concrete 24” deep. The platform is 19 feet wide and 8 feet deep. The front two posts are oak, and the back two are fir. I have much bigger and heavier logs available, but it’s quite difficult to raise a 400-pound log and drop it into a deep hole. I’ve done it before, but this time I wanted to keep the weight down. On the right side I installed diagonal support struts but I haven’t gotten to the left side yet. The structure is quite sturdy without the struts, but I like to over-engineer everything.
The gargoyle is bolted to a small wooden platform that is in turn bolted to the two frontal horizontal cross pieces. A power line runs up to him from an electricity source just off the left edge of the photo.
The gargoyle is equipped with a receiver for an infrared sensor just behind the position of the camera in this photo. An approaching car will trigger the infrared sensor, which will trigger the gargoyle, whose eyes blink rapidly in response. And he roars, too. He is illuminated from below at night. You can see him on YouTube here.