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Tag: Pumpkin Carving

  • The Agourdian Sends Off Halloween With A Song

    Halloween is over and we’ve had our fill of candy. Now we can all focus on Thanksgiving before the ruthless retail cycle shoves us into Christmas before we have a chance to catch our breath. Before all that though, let’s take one last look at Halloween with this amazing musical instrument made out of pumpkins.

    Self-professed musician, electrical engineer and amateur designer Chet Gnegy has created what he calls the Agourdian. It’s a synthesizer that responds to hand movements and creates tones for a wide range of musical applications. What makes this invention so unique is that the technology has been built into a range of seven pumpkins that light up while they’re being played.

    Gnegy explains how he did it in the video description:

    Seven jack-o-lanterns are equipped with infrared proximity sensors and synchronized flameless candles. In response to a human player moving their hands in an almost percussive manner, the jack-o-lanterns light up and produce tones. The system uses 555 timers as tone generators that are then processed and filtered using analog circuitry. An Arduino microprocessor is used to control lighting and volume envelopes and to receive the signals from the IR sensors.

    This year has proven to be amazing for pumpkin and Halloween related technical feats. First there was Pumpktris which recreated a playable form of Tetris inside of a pumkin. It was followed by an astounding stop motion animation that was created entirely with pumpkin carvings. Now this has topped it all of by proving that pumpkins can indeed be musical instruments.

    I can’t wait to see what these guys and others cook up for Thanksgiving. It’s an underappreciated holiday that needs more amazing feats of technical wizardry.

  • This Amazing Stop Motion Animation Was Made Entirely With Pumpkins

    Stop motion animation and Halloween seemingly go hand-in-hand. Ever since Mad Monster Party from Rankin Bass in 1967, a number of Halloween (or macabre) films have been shot using stop motion animation. The most famous is arguably Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Burton recently released Frankenweenie just in time for Halloween.

    All of the above films, except for maybe Mad Monster Party, exhibit finely detailed craft and puppets that move as if they were real. They are multi-million dollar productions that hundreds of people worked on to bring to life. That’s what makes the following short film all the more impressive. One man took numerous pumpkins to bring a short stop-motion film to life. It’s rather amazing, and is far more delightful than it has any right to be.

    Incredible Pumpkin Stop Motion from Auke de Vries on Vimeo.

    Stop motion is already a laborious process that requires the animators to take thousands of individual photos and string them together into a cohesive whole. The animator here also had to cut out each and every pumpkin individually for every shot. It’s only fair that he gets all the recognition in the world for pulling this off.

    For more awesome pumpkins, check out Pumpktris. It’s a fully playable game of Tetris, but inside a pumpkin.

    [h/t: John Nack]

  • Pumpktris Is The Best Pumpkin Carving You’ll See This Year

    Halloween is amazing for a number of reasons. One of which is the staggering amount of quality pumpkin carvings that grace the Internet every year. There’s always the intricately detailed carvings that depict famous characters from movies or video games, but the best carving you’ll see this year is an actual video game.

    Nathan Pryor has created a fully working version of Tetris inside of a pumpkin for Halloween this year. It’s called Pumpktris and you play it by moving the stem like a joystick. The bricks are illuminated by LEDs inserted inside of the pumpkin. It may not really count as a “carving,” but I still think it counts for just how amazing it is.

    Pumpktris is already cool enough, but Pryor saw fit to actually show everybody how he did it. The hardest part seems to have been the actual carving of the pumpkin. It looks simple, but Pryor had to be incredibly precise with his carvings so that everything would show up properly.

    Now that Pumpktris is a thing, I fully expect other classic games to be recreated on gourds. Super Zuchini Bros. sounds like a good start. That may be a bit hard to create with an 8×8 LED grid though.

    [h/t: Geekologie]

  • Pumpkin Carving Embraces The Future With PunkinBot

    I love carving pumpkins for halloween. There’s something timeless about carving a silly grin, or an awe-inspiring Predator face, into a pumpkin. The only problem is that its time consuming and rather messy for relatively little pay off. It’s about time we drag pumpkin carving into the future.

    Brian, Eric and Alex VanDiepenbos must have had the exact same thoughts when they built the punkinBot. It’s a CNC machine that carves pumpkins instead of metal and other materials. In a way, it’s similar to 3D printers, but these machines create objects out of an already existing piece of metal, or in this case, pumpkins.

    Here’s a video of the first carving done by the punkinBot at the Maker Faire in Detroit.

    For a first run, it’s pretty impressive. It’s obviously a little rough around the edges, but the concept is solid. It’s still very much just a conceptual piece for now, but this could be a thing in the future. Talentless pumpkin carvers could bring a pumpkin into a shop to have a custom carving job done for them on a machine.

    Even better, when will we able to just 3D print pumpkin-like material to create even more elaborate designs? It might be a little abstract, but what about a carve of the Eiffel Tower made entirely out of pumpkin-like material. The pumpkin carving masters might consider it cheating, but it would still be amazingly awesome.

    [h/t: Make]

  • Zombie Pumpkins Make For Awesome Web Content

    Pumpkin carving has been given new life by the Internet, and if you don’t believe me, just check out the various submissions on Reddit and other link-friendly sites. Like most interesting images, such pictures make for great web content. However, what happens when you introduce almost 4000 pounds of pumpkin into the equation and an awesome food sculptor?

    Perhaps the most awesome pumpkin carving I’ve ever seen.

    As you can see from the lead image, the result of Ray Villafane’s pumpkin carving is just an incredible scene that makes use of one of the Internet’s favorite horror subjects. According to reports, Villafane used two massive pumpkins to complete his carving. For the zombies, a 1693 pound pumpkin was used, and the sculptures from that huge gourd were transferred over to an even bigger pumpkin — 1818 pounds — which served as the base.

    The carving was done for at the New York Botanical Garden, and the associated blog post has a 13-image slideshow of the creative process involved in such awesomeness. Here’s another example:

    Zombie Pumpkin

    There’s also a time-lapse video of Villafane’s work in progress, which is just another example of the awesome web content such creations produce:


    Successful web content comes in many forms, and if you have an event and/or, are attending one and it has something you might be able to make compelling content out of, in today’s world, it’s imperative that you capitalize. Just look at the amount of publicity Villafane’s creation received.

    Boing Boing, Laughing Squid and Neatorama have all thrown links at the carving, and “zombie pumpkin” has a lot more coverage at Google News.

    Of course, finding such worthy content is the real trick, isn’t it?