Halloween is just around the corner, and it's time to plan your pumpkin carving. Kitty-cat pumpkin? Bo-ring. Skeleton? Meh. Traditional spooky-faced jack-o'-lantern? What are you, your parents? This year, step it up a notch. Here are some easy hacks to create jack-o'-lanterns with a tech twist.
3D-print a pumpkin
If you have access to a 3D printer, consider printing your own already "carved" pumpkin. You'll miss out on roasting pumpkin seeds, but printing your own is 99.9 percent less messy than digging around in a real pumpkin. Plus, it will never rot, so you can keep it for next year. Thingiverse and other 3D-printing marketplaces have lots of free templates to choose from. We made a cat, a skeleton, and a creepy-faced pumpkin—because we're that excited about Halloween.
For glow, we're opting for LED "throwie" lights, a geeky alternative to candles. It's a button cell battery with LED lights attached—just tape the pieces together, place them in your pumpkin, and you're set for days. If you're adventurous, add a resistor to make the lights glow brighter the darker the night gets.
Someone's watching you
To give trick-or-treaters a real thrill, add movement to a normally stationary jack-o'-lantern. We rigged two red LED lights and placed them inside our pumpkin's carved eye sockets, and they move back and forth when triggered. We set ours to respond to light, too, so the eyes turn on in the dark. (Alternatively, you could attach a motion sensor to the Arduino in place of the photoresistor to activate the pumpkin when people walk by.) This petrifying pumpkin appears to look around, eyes glowing red. Though we rigged this setup inside one of our 3D-printed pumpkins, it will work the same way in a real pumpkin, too.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon