Halloween project round-up | Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Woo-hoo! We won the grand prize in the MAKE & CRAFT Halloween contest for our set of halloween projects!

Just in case you missed them, here they are:

Apparently the world was ready for the invasion of Cylon Jack-o-lanterns— They made it onto TV, into magazines, and presumably onto a lot of front porches as well. Lots of people made their own and we’ve rounded up a list of some of the Cylon pumpkins (and umbrella-bat costumes) that we spotted this year. Read on to see where they showed up!

Our Cylon pumpkin showed up in the Approval Matrix feature of New York magazine, in the issue of Nov. 6, 2006. That’s like– (Gasp!) traditional print media!

Bre Pettis, who runs Make Magazine’s Podcast was featured recently on G4TV and showed off several projects, including along a little Cylon pumpkin that he made. Catch the video here. Thanks, Bre!

Speaking of video, we found a number of videos of cool Cylon pumpkins, mostly on YouTube:

I’m particularly fond of this one from the Kemple Blog, which has hilariously been edited into a video. It’s simultaneously more intimidating and funnier than our simple little videos.
The scanner on the pumpkin featured in this video looks particularly nice.
You can see the circuit for the cylon in this video laid out on a breadboard here.
Here’s a video of a nice looking cylon pumpkin with his blinky friend.
And here is a somewhat shaky video of another Cylon, gaurding the front porch.

We also found some interesting still photos on Flickr, as well as on a few blogs.

This one by Jared is dark and seems to lack a moving scanner, but the carving job is really quite excellent.
This one from Annie (control-freak80) shows some excellent details of the carving, including some spiffy zester work.
Here is a cylon with an animated eye that was made with a microcontroller, instead of the discrete method that I presented. Take a look at the rest of the set to see the (not very) gory details.
A set of Cylon Twins by notmonochrome
Here’s One by sriedel8093
One from Starfinn
And one from quietearth.us
Topping them all, look at these beauties from sassyblonde.net. They’ve even got the thermometer!

We also saw a lot of umbrella bat costumes this year; here are three of our favorites:

If you know of other Cylon, Bat, or Lego projects that were probably made with the help our guides, please let us know by leaving the relevant links in the comments. And remember, it’s never too early to get started on next year’s projects!

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