Here’s a great
Impress your neighbours this year by making an Arduino Smart Pumpkin, leave them wondering how it works or maybe share the tech knowledge with our quick how to video. This is frightfully fun and guaranteed to get a few jumps!
Here’s a guide to building your own smart pumpkin…
…in this case it’s just a flame effect and then when the response from a light dependent resistor, when somebody blocks the light, or stands over it changes it’s mode – it makes a noise and changes to green light for a short while.
The one in our video has a 24 neopixel ring to make the flame, but if you tweak the code a bit you can use any LEDs, and if you have two colours use the triggered mode to light a different circuit.
Follow these simple steps to create your own smart pumpkin. Firstly deal with the pumpkin in the traditional fashion, cut the top off (angling the knife down by about 45 degrees so it sits nicely into the hole), and proceed to scoop out the seeds and most of the flesh, ideally leaving about 1 cm of flesh and under the skin all around – this will help to remove any excess moisture meaning that your pumpkin won’t rot as quickly, and you can make a nice soup with the contents.
Featured Adafruit Product!
NeoPixel Ring – 24 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers: Round and round and round they go! 24 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 2.6″ (66mm) outer diameter. The rings are ‘chainable’ – connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock. (read more)
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each weekday this month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us on Google+, in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, or Twitter— we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). Tune in to our live shows, Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern, 3D hangouts with Matt, Pedro, and Noe, and Ask an Engineer, featuring store discount codes, ideas for projects, costumes, and decorations, and more!