Here's the pumpkin I built for the 2019 Paradowski Pumpkin Carving Contest.
Years ago I head the idea to create an interactive cauldron that triggered sound effects, lights, and fans to blow smoke when you waved RFID tags over a reader. I wrote the idea down in one of my good-idea notebooks and moved on because at that time I didn't know enough of the technology (or even enough of the electrical engineering concepts) to actually make it happen. That said, I knew that at some point I'd be able to figure it out. That some point ended up being the end of 2019 :)
The project overview video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pACb6IiKaRw
And you can find a ton of project status videos that I shot throughout the making of the pumpkin here on my vimeo channel.
- Adafruit M0 Basic Proto
- Music Maker FeatherWing w/ Amp
- Adafruit NeoPixel LED Strip w/ Alligator Clips
- MFRC-522 RFID Reader
- It wasn't this exact product page, but this is the reader type
- RFID/NFC stickers
- It wasn't this exact product page, but this is the reader type
- 4ohm speaker
- Micro USB fan
- I got mine from a dollar store, but it was this same fan
I'll add this one day if enough people are interested he said knowing that he'll probably never come back to do it :P
I modeled all of the parts for this project in Fusion 360. The final STLs can be found here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3966760