[KwartzLab] practice pumpkin carve

[doug moen]

Hello, Ryk John Miller Thekreator.  Please drop by at TON some
Tuesday, and consider volunteering.

James Bastow is coordinating the design of the electronics.  One thing
I do know is that we are using a programmable microcontroller to
generate the flickering effect, and we are providing a kit and
instructions for hacking this "pumpkin card" for uses other than
illuminating pumpkins.  And I know that cost is an issue, since we'd
like to fit 100 boards into our overall $1000 budget.  That's the
limit of my knowledge, James will have more information.

Doug.

On 16 September 2011 14:32, Richarius Molindarius
<richmolindarius at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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