Category Archives: Pumpkin

The Internet of Jack-O’-Lanterns

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As the candy rush fades, the Halloween hacks continue pouring in. [Jeremy S Cook] has taken a few fundamental concepts and dressed them up inside the smartest pumpkin on the block.

This pumpkin has a WEMOS D1 Mini ESP8266 brain, LED eyes in place of a candle for illumination, and a small USB power bank for power. The code [Cook] is using is a modified sketch by YouTuber [Innovative Tom], which creates a server on your network — don’t forget to insert your network credentials! — that enable control of the LEDs from your computer or smart phone.

[Cook] has …read more

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Pumpkin Piano Promises a Gourd Time

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Fall – it’s that time of year that brings falling leaves, Hallowe’en, and a pumpkin version of everything that you hold dear. In this case, it’s not a latte – it’s [Robert Vorthman]’s Pumpkin Piano.

[Robert] took a straightforward approach to the build, pressing a Raspberry Pi into service as the backbone of the operation. This is combined with an Adafruit breakout board for the MPR121, which is a chip that provides 12 capacitive touch-sensitive inputs. These are connected to the bountiful produce which make up the piano keys in this fun holiday hack. [Robert] uses some Python code that …read more

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Harpsi-Gourd Gets You Into Thanksgiving Spirit

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Halloween might be over, but for some of us there’s still another pumpkin-centric holiday right around the corner to give us an excuse to build projects out of various gourds. During a challenge at a local event, [Michael] came up with a virtual cornucopia of uses for all of the squashes he had on hand and built a touch-sensitive piano with all of them.

The musical instrument was dubbed the Harpsi-Gourd and makes extensive use of the Arduino touch-sensitive libraries. Beyond that, the project was constructed to be able to fit into a standard sized upright piano. While only 15 …read more

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Don’t Make Your Battlebot Out Of A Pumpkin

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It’s that time of year again. The nights are getting longer and the leaves are turning. The crisp fall air makes one’s thoughts turn to BattleBots: pumpkin-skinned BattleBots.

If you’re asking yourself, “could a laser-cut plywood bot, sheathed in a pumpkin, stand up against an all-metal monster”, you haven’t seen BattleBots before. Besides the hilarious footage (see video embedded below), a lot of the build is documented, from making a CAD model of a pumpkin to laser-cutting the frame, to “testing” the bot just minutes before the competition. (That has to be a good idea!)

The footage of the pumpkinbot’s …read more

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The Pumpkin Noti-Fire

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Everyone has an episode somewhere in their youth involving the use of an aerosol spray as an impromptu flamethrower. Take some mildly inebriated teenagers, given them a deodorant can and a box of matches, and sooner or later one or two of them are going to lose their eyebrows.

For most of us an amusing teenage episode is how the aerosol flamethrower remains. Not for [Mike Waddick] though, when last week’s DDoS attack on DNS infrastructure took away his ability to work his, attention turned to a Halloween project. He created a carved pumpkin that spits fire as a notification …read more

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