Tag Archives: holiday

Halloween project round-up

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Headless horseman

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!
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Easy Itty-Bitty Blinky LED Jack-O’-Lantern

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Halloween is tomorrow! Do you want to bring a carved pumpkin to work, but aren’t allowed to burn candles in your cubicle? Do you want to carve a mini-pumpkin that’s simply too small for a candle?

Or are you just running late and need to make a procrastinator’s pumpkin?

If you said yes to any of these questions, we just might have the solution that you’re looking for. Here’s an easy way to make a tiny blinking-LED jack-o’-lantern.

The blinking LED circuit is borrowed from a Tirefly, a commonly available type of motion-sensitive light that attaches to the valve stem on the wheel of a bike or car. Our quick modification (less than five minutes and no soldering) defeats the motion sensor so that the LED can blink all day (or all night) for you. (For hardened geeks who want to solder something anyway, we’ll also show you how to mod the circuit to use a higher-capacity battery.)

[Update: (10/2008) A reader wrote in that they have had trouble getting the circuit to blink continuously; the tirefly circuit may have been changed. (Confirmed– It has changed!) Do any other readers have recent success or failure to report?]
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Building a Robotic Dalek Pumpkin

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EXTERMINATE!!! EXTERMINATE!!! EXTERMINATE!!!

We Evil Mad Scientists like Halloween. A lot.

You might have already seen our old-school Cylon Jack-o-lantern. Here is another halloween electronics project, hopefully in time for you to make your own: It’s a radio-controlled robotic Dalek that can move around and turn its head. Oh, and did I mention that it’s a pumpkin?
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Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern

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It’s a pumpkin! It’s a Jack-o-lantern! It’s an electronics project! It’s… a Cylon!

Cylons are great. They’re evil, menacing, and shiny. They have glowing red lights, computer-monotone voices, and they aim as precisely as imperial stormtroopers.

For halloween this year, we made Cylon Jack-o-lanterns in both large and small versions.

The design consists of two parts, a pumpkin-carving part and an electronics part. The big idea, of course, is to make the Cylon’s red eye scan back and forth.

How well does it work? Take a look! (Youtube)

This week’s Weekend Projects Podcast at Make Magazine is about making a programmable LED pumkin.

Our Cylon is made with a very different approach. It runs on a 9V battery and uses two cheap integrated circuits (a 555 and 4017) that together control six LEDs (or six groups of LEDs).

Circuits like this are quick, easy, and cheap to build. It’s also fun merely from the standpoint of making something that people might expect to require a microcontroller. For this particular circuit, it turns out to be cheaper and faster to do it without one.

If you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can build this circuit for less than ten dollars, in less than two hours, without any programming at all.
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