Happy Halloween to all the ghosts, ghouls, monsters et al. running around tonight in search of (or distributing) sugary snacks. I’ll be looking forward to all the awesome costumes floating around the internet in the next few days…not that I haven’t seen any sweet ones already.

Sadly, I haven’t made a costume for this year but I have rigged up a plastic jack-o-lantern that I bought last year. It’s amazing how much the price drops on these things when they’re “broken.” All I had to do was bust out the soldering iron and reattach the battery lead. Using an arduino, the Cap Sense Library, tin foil and some LEDs, I made a touch sensitive jack-o-lantern that I call the “Cyber Punkin.”




The end product worked pretty well. I hooked up a 9V battery to the arduino and found that the capacitance features were acting strangely. It turned out that the whole thing wasn’t very well grounded, so in order to have predictable results, you had to hold the battery while touching the pads. Here are some more photos of the setup:

Foil Pads on the back of the pumpkin

Pads connecting to the arduino