# My take on singing pumpkin



## Torque (Aug 4, 2012)

Hi all,

Got my hardware in order the other day, and have "completed" my singing pumpkin project. More songs to sequence, and a cabinet/housing to build, but at least all the components are in working order.

I've been lurking both here and at diyc for the last several months working out how and what I was going to do to achieve what you see in the embedded video.

Some tech info:

I first cut the song into several pieces, each less than 20 seconds long. Each piece went into Papagayo and I processed the animations, matching them to the lyrics. The 25 or so "chunks" were then dropped into Vixen, 1X1 using the converter addin that can be found @ diyc. Worked out the eyes, the bliking, and the in-between parts that didn't need lip-syncing.

I ordered up a couple of 3'X3' 1/2" thick plastic pieces, and had a machinist friend punch out the 430-or so holes on a mill, with the coordinated I gave him. We then scored several 100 light strings from Target @ $3.50 a piece, and hot-glued each bulb into the pre-drilled board.

An order from Mouser arrived, and I then set up a homemade 8-channel solid state relay, based largely on diyc's SSREZ circuit. The board is mounted on standoffs on the back of the lightboard, and a 23 position terminal strip handles all of the AC in/out connections. An ethernet cable is soldered to the SSR board and runs to the arduino's digital output pins. Vixen streams serial data to the Arduino along the USB cable, which also supplies the arduino's operating voltage, which it passes through the ethernet cable to trigger the optoisolators.

I've actually put this together in short order, having first envisioned the project only about 90 days ago, while surfing the net trying to find easy projects to add to my very small yard haunt. This show will hang on the front porch, and out public sidewalk isn't but 15-20 feet away, so it really will be larger than life, and I'm sure more appealing to the naked eye than the video shows.

Enjoy, comments and questions anticipated.






p.s. it appears as since this is my first post, I may not be able to embed this video, could a mod please do so?


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## hpropman (Jul 27, 2008)

Hey nice job with those! They remind me of my pumpkins, Keep extra bulbs around they burn out from constantly being switched on and off. I have converted my pumpkins to orange led boards this year and dropped the solid state relays for a few transistors to switch the pumpkins on and off. I need to finish the controller and get a video up with the new lights. Here is some videos of them with the bulbs.










http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v147/jmalt31/Halloween%202010/?action=view&current=SDV_0137.mp4

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v147/jmalt31/Halloween%202010/?action=view&current=SDV_0141.mp4


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