jack-o-lanterns

9 Articles

Start Your Creepy Jack-O-Lantern Project Early This Year With Gourdan

May 2, 2024 by 1 Comment

For a lot of us, projects take time, and they have to be squeezed in around the regular chores of real life. Thus, if you’re starting your Halloween builds after the holiday displays have already hit the stores, you’re probably too late. We’re here to implore you to start building early this year—and you can take inspiration from a great pumpkin called Gourdan.

Gourdan is the work of [Braden Sunwold]. It’s a pumpkin with a fearsome visage and creepy eyes that follow you around the room. This is achieved thanks to a Raspberry Pi 3 nestled within Gourdan’s gourdy body. Gourdan’s eyes are a pair of 1.54-inch LCDs which display animated eyes. Thus, no mechanical wizardry is required here—it’s all done digitally. A camera attached to the Raspberry Pi tracks people with the aid of OpenCV, and the eyes are created and animated with the help of Adafruit example code.

There’s never a better time to start hacking for Halloween than right now. And hey, who knows—your neighbour might have kicked off in January, so they’ll have an almighty head start. They could have something really impressive in the works!

And don’t forget—you can always send us your holiday hacks, whatever the time of year! Just hit up the tipsline. Happy making!

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Musical Jack-o-Lanterns Harmonize For Halloween

October 12, 2023 by 4 Comments

Halloween is many things to many people. For some, it’s a chance to dress up and let loose. For others, it’s a chance to give everyone in the neighborhood a jump scare. For [Aaron], it’s the perfect time to put on a show in the yard with some musical, light-up jack-o-lanterns.

[Aaron] came across some deeply-discounted light-up jack-o-lanterns a few years ago. They all had one of those Try Me buttons that’s powered by a couple of coin cells and uses a temporary two-wire connection to the PCB, and [Aaron] figured he could remotely control them using this port of sorts.

Now the guts are made of addressable RGB LEDs that are connected through the battery compartment via weatherproofed pigtails.

On the control side, he has a Raspberry Pi 3, an amplifier, and a couple of power supplies all housed in a weatherproof box. Since it’s not possible to multiplex both the lights and the audio on a Pi 3, he added a USB sound card into the mix.

Be sure to check out the awesome demo video after the break, followed by a pumpkin conversion video.

If you’re more into scaring people, carve up an animated evil-eye pumpkin.

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Flickering Jack O’ Lantern Is An Easy Beginner Build

October 19, 2021 by 8 Comments

The Jack o’ Lantern is a fun Halloween tradition, though one that does come with a few risks. It’s pretty easy to slice off a bit of finger when carving a stiff pumpkin, and candles draw more enmity from fire crews than most household items. For the electronics beginner looking for a learning project, [Oyvind’s] build might be a nice safe bet.

The build starts with a 3D-printed pumpkin figurine with a suitably spooky face, though [Oyvind] notes there’s nothing stopping this project from being executed with a real orange gourd instead. Inside, an Arduino is hooked up to a trio of orange LEDs. They’re attached to PWM pins and each is given a random brightness value at regular intervals to create a pleasant flickering effect.

It’s a very simple project, but it’s also the kind of thing that’s perfect for introducing new people into the world of electronics. There’s little to get wrong, and mistakes aren’t costly, making it an ideal project for beginners. From there, the sky really is the limit! Video after the break.

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Stomp Button, Receive Candy

October 19, 2020 by 5 Comments

If there’s any holiday that is worth adjusting for strange times, it’s gotta be Halloween. Are you inclined to leave a bowl of candy on the porch to avoid the doorbell? If so, this is the perfect year to finally figure out some sort of metering apparatus so that greedy preteens are less likely to steal your stash in one sweep. There’s still time to make something fun like [Brankly]’s automatic candy dispenser, which we think ought to stick around for many years to come. Video is posted after the break.

Underneath that skeleton’s jack-o-lantern head is the heart of this build — an orange 5-gallon bucket that matches it perfectly. Simply step on the giant lighted arcade button, and the equally giant NEMA-23 stepper motor moves a 3D-printed turntable inside the bucket with the help of an Arduino Nano. This moves the candy toward the 3D-printed ramp and out the mouth of the jack-o-lantern, where it lands in a bowl that lights up when it hits the bottom thanks to a relay and a second Nano.

[Brankly] made clever use of IR break-beam switches, which sit underneath the two square holes in the ramp. Once candy passes over one of them, the turntable stops and rotates backward to move the candy where it can’t be reached.

Frankly, we love that [Brankly] reused the sound effects module that came with the jack-o-lantern. This build is totally open, and [Brankly] is even giving away 40 PCBs if you want to make your own. For now, you can check out the code and start printing the STLs.

If time is tight, build a spooky slide that puts six feet between you and the trick or treaters.

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Alexa Controls This Savage Pumpkin

January 18, 2020 by 6 Comments

Traditionally, pumpkins are carved during the holiday of Halloween to represent malicious and frightening beasts. Flying in the face of this is [minihannah]’s carving of Adam Savage, which she’s calling a hero pumpkin. It’s a fun twist on the custom, and of course, it’s packing WiFi too.

The build starts with a carving of the typical orange winter squash cultivar, using artwork cribbed from the cover of Mr. Savage’s biography. Inside, there’s a bunch of LEDs, all under the control of an adafruit feather M0, which talks to the broader internet over WiFi. The pumpkin can be controlled by Alexa, thanks to the combination of Adafruit.IO and IFTTT.

It’s a fun little Internet of Things build, and one that’s ready for the modern smarthome, where you’re already used to yelling at the lights to switch off. We’d love to see a similar Billy Corgan build, if only for the pun. If you give it a go, be sure to drop us a line. Video after the break.

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PIR Jack-o-Lantern Sees Them Coming

October 31, 2015 by 4 Comments

Planning to make that carved a pumpkin last past Halloween night? Forget the tealight or LED candle—here’s an easy, no-solder project that will make it extra special. By default, this jack-o-lantern looks like it has a flickering flame, but get close enough to it and it goes crazy with color.

All you need is an LED matrix, a Rainbowduino to drive it, a PIR motion sensor to trigger the random colors, and a power source. [Alpha Charlie] kept the electronics from becoming pumpkin-flavored with some plastic bags. Since he used the PIR as the jack-o-lantern’s nose, there is a bit of plastic behind it to keep moisture from interfering.

[Alpha Charlie]’s build instructions are quite detailed, which makes this project even simpler if you’ve never used a PIR before. There are lots of ways you could build on this project to make it your own, like using trick-or-treater motion to trigger screams or spooky sounds, or add more sensors to make it more interactive. Watch it react after the break.

If you have nothing else at all to do between now and trick-or-treat time, you could bust out the soldering iron and recreate this 70-LED matrix jack-o-lantern. Blinkenlights too safe for your tastes? Fire-breather it is, then.

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Pumpkin with a motion detector to deter squirrels

Scare Off Squirrels And Tweet About It With The Jack-O’-Lantern Warning System

October 31, 2014 by 3 Comments

[Stephpalm] had carved a pumpkin for the first time in two decades. Unfortunately, the neighborhood squirrels were all too pleased with her work and devoured it. Her original goal for the jack-o’-lantern was to have its lights controlled over the internet. These hungry critters inspired another project instead – The Jack-’o’-Lantern Squirrel Early Warning System. There have been hacks that have dealt with pesky squirrels before, such as a trap and an automatic water turret, but they didn’t have the ability to post to social media like this system does.

The system consists of a Spark Core, a passive infrared (PIR) sensor, and a piezo buzzer. When the motion sensor is triggered the buzzer sounds, scaring away any peckish creatures lurking nearby. [Stephpalm] used an NPN transistor and 1k-Ohm resistor to provide enough current to drive the buzzer. All of these components were connected using jumper wires and a breadboard that sits on top of the pumpkin. As a nod to her original idea, [stephpalm] then created “Pumpkin Watch Code” and loaded it into the Core. It posts preset messages to a Twitter account every 45 minutes of inactivity or whenever a pesky squirrel is detected. The messages can be personalized for anyone who wants to make one of these themselves.

We wonder if it would be better to place the breadboard inside the jack-o’-lantern and carve out a couple of holes on top for the PIR sensor’s wires to come out of. That would offer some protection from the elements and prevent it from getting knocked over. We think this project could be adapted for many other uses. After the break, see a video of the system in action!

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