[KwartzLab] practice pumpkin carve

[Richarius Molindarius]

Hi all. Ryk John Miller Thekreator here. :)
I'm not yet a member but I had a few thoughts in case they may help:
For LEDs, super bright LEDs could cut down the current requirements per LED
from 20 milliamps to 2mA. Though they are clear they can be manually frosted
for wider dustribution.
Cycling was mentioned. How about cycling red orange and yellow to simulate a
candle? Possible with a CD40106 and a CD4070 maybe. I just now sketched out
a circuit I can try.

On 2011-09-16 12:59 PM, "doug moen" <doug at moens.org> wrote:

Planning for Hacky Halloween is under way:
http://kwartzlab.ca/mediawiki/index.php?title=Hacky_Halloween

I don't know the full list of people who are or will be involved, so
I'm spamming the public list.

I'd like to suggest that before we lock in certain decisions
(purchasing the pumpkin knives, finalizing the design of the
electronics, etc), we have a practice pumpkin carve.  This will give
us some information needed for planning, to resolve some open
questions.  This should happen sooner rather than later.

* carving tools. We will be teaching the zombiepumpkins.com / Jeff
Schmidt way of pumpkin carving.  Jeff recommends against using
commercial plastic pumpkin knives, as they give poor results, and
recommends his own knife design on instructables.  zombiepumpkins has
their own recommendations for a good set of tools to use.  So we
should build some of Jeff's knives, buy commercial pumpkin knives, put
together a zombiepumpkin tool set, and experiment.

* illumination.  Jeff used 7 LEDs to illuminate his ET pumpkin design:
a yellow LED throwable for the glowing finger tip, plus 6 white LEDs
for the interior.  I would personally like to have 2 red LEDs to make
glowing eyes, plus additional LEDs (possibly also red) to illuminate
the interior.  I think we should experiment to find out how many LEDs,
at what power output, are needed for good results in illuminating the
interior.  And we need an option for embedding LEDs in the exterior
surface, for doing special effects.  Some people might want to embed
all of their LEDs, and use a candle on the inside.  Do we support more
than one blink/flicker option?  The results of these experiments will
influence the electronics design.

* pipelining and kid management.  I'm thinking that we might want a
pipeline up to 3 deep: a work area for hollowing out the pumpkin and
disposing of the guts, a work area for carving the pumpkin in the
zombiepumpkins style, using templates, and a work area for soldering
LEDs onto your circuit board.  Maybe the first two areas are combined,
I dunno.  The soldering area should be separate, because not all
pumpkin carvers are going to participate in that, I expect.  Although
we will provide incentives by showing off prebuilt pumpkins with LEDs
installed.

For each work area, the question is whether we allow kids to
continually stream in and out (with a max # of kids at any given
time), or whether we have a series of scheduled workshops that begin
at specific times of the day (for which you have to obtain a ticket,
to limit workshop size to what our volunteers can handle).

Comments?  Alternative suggestions?  Volunteers?

Thanks, Doug.

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