10 Pumpkin Hacks for Before and After Halloween
It’s unfortunate that millions of pumpkins are ritually sacrificed every year—gutted, carved up, torched with a candle, and then left to rot—as part of the festive decor for a single holiday. Pumpkins have so much more potential and deserve an extra level of creativity.
Whether you’re looking for a way to step up your Halloween decor, or an alternative to chucking your pumpkin in the forest on November 1 as you make room for pine garland and Christmas lights, here are some incredibly creative pumpkin hacks and clever ways to re-use your gourds.
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Flame-Throwing Notifications For Texts and Emails
Pumpkin NotiFire | 📱 + ✉️ = 🎃 🔥 🔥
Setting safety aside, Mike Waddick, from the YouTube channel, Punch Through Design, turned a jack-o’-lantern into a hard-to-ignore notification device for texts and emails. An automatic Glade air freshener was connected to a Lightblue Bean microcontroller that received signals about new texts and emails from an iPhone over Bluetooth. The notification would trigger the aerosol air freshener to emit a quick blast, which was ignited by a tea candle, creating a quick burst of flames that burns knuckles and grabs anyone’s attention.
Create a Pumpkin Piano
Pumpkin Piano with Raspberry Pi
As Halloween fades into memory and you start queueing up your Christmas tunes, why not turn your collection of pumpkins into a musical instrument? Robert Vorthman’s Pumpkin Piano is powered by a Raspberry Pi and an MPR121 chip connected to 12 touch-sensitive capacitive sensors. A dozen gourds stand in for piano keys, which, before they dry out completely, are moist enough to register a physical touch, triggering notes through a software synthesizer.
Shoot Down a Drone
Pumpkin Cannon vs Drone - Stupidest Drone Crash Ever - I’m a moron
A simple idea of using a drone to capture aerial footage of a gourd blasted out of a pumpkin cannon at 200mph turned into an unexpected alternate use for an unwanted jack-0'-lantern. The YouTube channel, UglyTutorials, found out the hard way what happens to a DJI Phantom 2 drone when it crosses paths with a pumpkin flying through the air at 200mph: $500 worth of repairs and replacement parts for the drone, although the attached GoPro was just fine after a four-hour search to find where it landed in the nearby woods.
Build an Over-the-Top Pumpkin Carving Robot
Making a robot to carve photos into pumpkins
Shane Wighton is hands down one of the most talented engineers and makers on YouTube, creating everything from a flying, never-miss basketball hoop, to an explosive baseball bat for shattering home run records. A few years ago, Wighton endeavored to take pumpkin carving to a new level with a robotic system that first maps the size, shape, and surface features of a pumpkin, and then carves it into an elaborate jack-o’-lantern. The machine can either hack all the way through the pumpkin’s walls or just carve an image into it in 3D, creating a lithophane that only exposes the image when light shines through it.
Finish Your Pumpkin Carving With Explosives
Halloween Blast-O-Lantern (Exploding Pumpkin Face)
This pumpkin-carving technique from the YouTube channel, TKOR (The King of Random), doesn’t make the process any easier or neater. In fact, it adds another step to the process with considerably more mess because once the jack-0'-lantern’s face was carved, instead of removing the cut pieces, the pumpkin was filled with water and calcium carbide to create a mix that produced acetylene gas with enough explosive power to blow the eyes and mouth pieces clean off the pumpkin. The satisfying boom more than makes up for the extra mess to clean up afterward.
Play Tetris on the Pumpktris
Pumpktris
If it seems like all the kids in your neighborhood have grown up and you spend most of Halloween night standing around waiting for trick-or-treaters to knock, just do what Nathan Pryor did and carve a fully-functional Tetris game into your pumpkin. In addition to carefully drilling and carving out square holes for all 128 LEDs used to create the pixelated display, Pryor managed to camouflage all of the other electronics inside, and even turned the pumpkin’s stem into a functional joystick for actually playing the game.
Build an RC Pumpkin Hovercraft
I Made A Pumpkin Hovercraft
Carving a pumpkin is a great activity for kids, but their interest starts to wane when the knife play ends. How do you make pumpkins interesting again for wee ones? You can follow in William Osman’s footsteps and hack the bottom off a gourd, integrate the blower from a handheld vacuum into it, and then add a couple of drone motors and propellers up top to create a functional pumpkin hovercraft that not only skims across smooth surfaces but can be steered around with a wireless remote.
Terrorize Trick-or-Treaters With a Honking Car Horn Pumpkin
New bigger nose button
Are you the type who leans more toward tricks than treats on Halloween? You’ll find yourself in good company with Todd Harrison who carved a jack-o’-lantern with a rather basic face and a tempting red arcade button for the nose. What kid on Earth would be able to resist pushing that button? Maybe one who’s worried about hearing loss because the button triggers the pumpkin’s eyes to light up, followed shortly after by a 105-decibel blast from a car horn hidden inside. It’s the perfect way to scare kids and an even better way to test your neighbors’ patience for a night.
Animate Your Pumpkin With Unsettling 3D-Printed Eyes
Animatronic Pumpkin Using 3D Printed Arduino Animatronic Eye Mechanism
Looking like a prop cooked up for a local haunted house experience, Will Cogley managed to make a pumpkin with a traditional jack-o’-lantern face look absolutely terrifying with a pair of animated eyes that include 3D-printed eyelids that open and close to give the gourd a very human-like appearance. The eyes’ movements aren’t random either, they’re actually wirelessly controlled by a Nintendo Wii Nunchuck motion-sensing controller so they can appear to move around and follow specific things, like an unsuspecting trick-or-treater who’s in for an evening full of nightmares.
Build a Pumpkin Gaming PC
A gaming PC inside a PUMPKIN!
Struggling to find exactly the right case for your next gaming PC build that’s guaranteed to fit all your components? Look no further than your front porch on November 1. Not only does a jack-o’-lantern’s face offer lots of opportunities for cooling and ventilation, but if a graphics card or drive doesn’t fit, you can easily carve away the pumpkin’s interior until it does. Need to run another cable? That’s no problem, you can punch as many holes in your pumpkin as you need. Will it smell like baked rotting pumpkin after an hour of intense gaming? That’s for future you to worry about.
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