Pumpkin Hack!

On Sunday we had our first Aberystwyth Robotics Club pumpkin hack. Kids, pumpkins, flashing lights and electronics together in a fun afternoon workshop.

In the carving station, the kids hacked away at their pumpkins with kid-safe tools or gave their design to one of our high powered Dremel wielding helpers. With a suggested age range of 6-12 we weren’t going to let the attendees loose with super sharp knives or powertools, but they managed to design their pumpkins themselves and help to cut them out (or at least, carve them)

In the coding zone, we had a bunch of laptops, a bunch of Arduino nano microcontrollers, battery packs, wires and some ultra-bright LEDs. Kids wired up their own microcontrollers, with assistance from our student helpers, then programmed them in Arduino C. The programming aspect was mostly copy-and-paste but with just an hour and a bit to spend on it the wiring and the coding was sufficient to keep everyone involved.

Our final display was so much more impressive than I expected.

Here’s the “After” pic:

Here’s a google docs link to the Arduino handout if you want to try running a similar event yourself. You need a lot of helpers, as it’s quite easy to wire things up wrong, and the coding involves working out what bits to copy and paste. But it works, and we had kids as young as 6 with flashing pumpkins and big smiles. The one scary moment was when we realised that windows update had run on all of our laptops, taking out the Arduino drivers. But with the help of one of the attendees, we got around that (phew!) by booting into linux then editing perms on the USB ports.