Robo Pumpkin!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Thursday (last week) was a pretty awesome day. I had a good project status for my COSI for credit, I learnt more about LaTeX (and started to typeset my summer research paper) thanks to Zach’s presentation, and there was a pumpkin carving contest for the robotics floor!

Last year I spent a lot of time soldering LEDs and shrink wrapping them, exactly for the purpose of pumpkin decorating!

This year I did one of those ‘etching’ carves of a robot, and used my LEDs to make it more awesome!

It looks pretty cool. Maybe next year I’ll go all out and add a distance sensor and a speaker so that it can sense if something approaches it, then play creepy music/sounds

Here’s a video of the pumpkin in action…

The pumpkin ended up landing itself in COSI for the holiday Hopefully spreading the Halloween joy of computer science to everyone!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

LED Star Pumpkin

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, October 31st, 2008

I did make something for Hallowe’en… it isn’t much, but it’s just LEDs in a pumpkin in the shape of the star. The most time consuming part was cutting the wires and soldering them… plus, I had to solder a 1K Ohm resistor to each of the positive leads too. Then, I had to shrink wrap it so it wouldn’t short out (like some of the LEDs on BubbleBoy short out because I didn’t shrink wrap them).

It was okay- I wasn’t too pleased with the end result because I didn’t place the points on the star right… and I wanted to carve it out. :/

I knew from the start though that I want to re-use these LEDs, so I have them all connected into a small black box. Inside of the box is an Arduino – a RBBB. On the outside of the box held together by tape is the 9V battery and a latching switch.

The program basically cycles the LEDs like a marquee in HTML, then blinks them “seizingly” fast (LOL).

I think I may put the LEDs up in my window… it might look cool!

Posted in: Art, Projects.