I had a lot of fun with the RRoD pumpkin, but as I said in that post I really wanted to make the middle green like it was supposed to be. Some empty Sprite bottles, a plastic cup, and some tape later… problem solved:

There’s some video of it blinking here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rd8pvUZAfg.

Also, I wanted something vaguely scary/Halloween related, so I made one with a Gears of War logo. GoW2 next week!

I said I had big plans for another Halloween pumpkin, and those weren’t it. I now present the Rick-ro-lantern. Hm, I may need to work on that name.

Video was shot with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37.

I initially wanted to have the whole thing self-contained, but didn’t come up with the idea in time to do that by Halloween. Instead, I decided to put it in front of the window, with a speaker and webcam inside. I used Motion to detect movement with the camera, and then start the song playing. The camera didn’t see anything at all at night (even with the outdoor light on), so I went with the light you can see at the beginning of the video. It’s the only thing the camera can see, so when someone walks between it and the camera, the software sees it as movement.

My carving skills are fairly lacking, but it came out well enough, I guess. Need practice.

Here’s some more pictures of the process and setup:

You can see all the pictures, with a little bit of explanation on some of them, in the flickr set: http://flickr.com/photos/penner42/sets/72157608232548269/.

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