Trick or Treat Greeter

Made a spooky tech pumpkin to sit on your porch and greet kids as they Trick or Treat! Included is a video of the final project.

Materials needed:

-access to carved pumpkin or a 3D printer to print shape

-CPB microcontroller

-Servo motor

-Small speaker

-VL53L1X distance sensor

-laser cutter for spooky ghost

-acrylic paint

-hot glue gun

-sand paper

-small drill

Download the pumpkin shape from Thingiverse and format in prusa to get correct size. Make sure it is large enough to fit all the components inside.

This step involved sanding down the pumpkin. The 3D printed shape was quite rough so this was necessary for a nice paint job.

Once this was done, paint the pumpkin desired colors! I went for orange exterior with some fun black eyes and yellow smile to give it more of that Jack-O-lantern feel!

After this (not pictured) I drilled a hole in the back of my pumpkin to fit the servo monitor wires through. Then hot glue the servo to the back of the pumpkin.

From knowledge learned in my Physical Computing class I added functionality to my CPB to make this work of art interactive! The file of code is included.

This included:

• programing the VL53L1X distance sensor to resonate when someone walks by the pumpkin
• setting up the servo monto to move when someone walks by the pumpkin
• have the CPB light up red when someone walks by
• play a spooking sound
• Note: For the spooky sound, I downloaded a free file from the internet and converted it in Audacity to be the right size and format for the CPB. A video for how to do this is listen on Professor Gallagher's youtube channel.

For the final touch, I laser cut a ghost shape created in Adobe. I then painted it and glued this to the back of the servo motor by attaching it to a stick!

You can also see here how all the wires and CPB fit into the base of the pumpkin!