Halloween Props: Pie of Sauron

pie-of-sauron

[Richard] combined creative carving with vacuum tube electronics for a unique pumpkin offering. He used the stencil-and-cut method of carving, making use of an inexpensive carving kit for great results. He salvaged an LED module from a flashlight to provide the internal illumination, but it’s the center feature that we like the best. [Richard's] used a glow-transfer counting tube, or dekatron, which provides something like a circular cylon eye to the project. There’s a video of this after the break.

You might not have access to a wicked-looking dekatron but we’re guessing you’ve got a microcontroller and some LEDs lying around that can serve as a stand-in for one night. We’d love to do a reader jack-o-lantern roundup, so if you build something, send us a picture!

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Dekatron kitchen timer

tube

[Eschlaep] put together this beautiful kitchen timer using a dekatron. We see all kinds of tube projects, but dekatron projects are fairly rare. The over all aesthetic is quite nice, though we’d be tempted to find a way to protect that high voltage circuit.

[via the Hack a Day flickr pool]