Halloween props: Techy Jack-o-lanterns

Halloween is this weekend. If you still have some time and parts available, you might be looking to spice up your Jack-o-lantern.  We’ve found a few projects that we thought might be nice to share. None of them would merit a post on their own, so we thought we would just round them up and share them all at once. … Read the rest

Halloween props: The honking pumpkin

_honking_pumpkin (Custom)

We see a lot of Halloween projects attempt to scare people. Many of them work with the element of surprise, jumping or flashing lights when triggered. We’ve noticed though, people have come to expect those things. This project is a real sleeper. No one expects a couple car horns to blare in their face  when they push the pumpkin’s nose. … Read the rest

Scare ‘em silly with a moving pumpkin

rovin_pumpkin

Halloween is a scary time for the little ones. It’s dark, they can barely see through their injection molded Spiderman masks, but it’s all worth it for the candy.

Our friends over at Evil Mad Scientist Labs have produced a pumpkin that moves on its own. The little pumpkin was disemboweled from the bottom and its guts were replaced … Read the rest

Hack-o’-lantern

[Todd] sent in his Hack-o’-lantern just a bit late for Halloween. He did a good job of working with the logo considering the difficulty it poses for pumpkin carving.  We would have been proud to have that on our porch for the kids to steal and smash in the road. Since others in the past have also done Hack a Read the rest

CNC pumpkin carving

How do hardware geeks carve pumpkins?  With giant home made CNC mills, that’s how. Using the open source CNC kit from Lumenlab.com, they converted a photograph into g-code, then fed it to the machine. After about 20 minutes of pumpkin drilling, they had this beautiful jack-o’-lantern. We are definitely jealous. Keep up the good work Lumenlab.… Read the rest

Flameless jack-o’-lantern with an ATtiny13

[aballen] wanted to light the jack-o’-lantern this year with something that didn’t actually require fire. After searching for a project that was cheap and yielded decent results, he ended up just making his own. This project utilizes an ATtiny13 and two LEDs, red and orange.  The overall build is quick and simple with some very basic code for the … Read the rest

Happy Halloween Extra


Happy Halloween! I’m in the mood for an extra, and I’ve got some stuff that’s been turning to zombies from the tipline.
Pictured above is a nice simple LED pumpkin sent in by [John]- perfect for the hacker with less than stellar art skills.
Let’s not forget [mastershake]s Hack-A-Day pumpkin from last year. Where’s the THAD pumpkin you promised? … Read the rest