Post : Singing pumpkins
URL : http://hackaday.com/2012/10/15/singing-pumpkins/
Posted : October 15, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Author : Mike Szczys
Tags : animatronic, ghostbusters, halloween, Halloween props, pumpkin
Categories : Holiday Hacks

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/animatronic-pumpkins.jpg

This Halloween table will sing a sweet serenade to spook your guests (http://www.minioncity.com/2012/10/14/diy-animatronic-pumpkins-or-fondly-know-as-jack-o-and-the-lanterns/) . Each of the animatronic pumpkins were quite easy to build, but you may end up spending a bit more time choreographing the performance.

Inside each Jack-o-lantern you'll find a custom Arduino compatible board called a Minion board. These include a wireless connection which lets the system sync with the computer playing the audio. The pumpkins are fake, which means that can be reused year after year (unlike our LED matrix inside a real pumpkin (http://hackaday.com/2010/10/26/70-led-matrix-in-a-jack-o-lantern/) ). The mouth is connected to a servo with a short piece of bent wire, allowing it to flap along with the words of a song. You can see a performance of the Ghostbusters theme in the clip after the break.

A custom GUI was written in C# to aid in the choreography. It handles the playback of the song, with a few buttons that can be used to record the light and mouth effects. This 'recording' is then used to drive the pumpkins during a performance.

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