Do Pumpkins Make Good Mechanical Keyboards?

Unless you really like pumpkin pies or roasted pumpkin seeds, then all of those pumpkins you bought for fall décor and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns are going to go to a landfill. You could feed your old pumpkins to animals like pigs, but you don’t own pigs, do you? Luckily for the pigless among you who hate waste, there is one use for pumpkins that you definitely haven’t thought of: as the base for computer keyboards. Inspired by a quirky old typewriter, Elijah Horland turned a pumpkin into a sort of spherical mechanical keyboard.

Horland was clearly channeling Michael Reeves when he tackled this project and made his video, but we won’t hold that against him since he did it well. His inspiration for this project came from the strange and historically significant Hansen Writing Ball. That weird typewriter was first built in 1865 and then in 1870 became the first typewriter ever sold commercially. Its inventor, Reverend Rasmus Malling-Hansen, solved many of the practical problems with typewriter mechanisms by arranging the keys around a hemisphere. Horland took a similar approach with this project by placing key switches all around the roughly spherical surface of a pumpkin.

Aside from the odd shape and the use of a gourd as an enclosure, this is a pretty conventional hand-wired mechanical keyboard. The controller is an Arduino Pro Micro board and it monitors the 54 key switches through a matrix setup (complete with anti-ghosting diodes). Horland mounted the key switches to the pumpkin by first cutting out circular plugs from the gourd’s outer husk. He then ran the wires through those to the Arduino sitting inside of the pumpkin’s interior, then stuck the plugs back in.

We’re being charitable when we say that this pumpkin keyboard works. It does technically give a user the ability to enter characters, but the ergonomics are so bad that Horland wasn’t even able to compete in a typing game meant for children. There is also the whole “it will rot soon” thing to contend with. But at least it is environmentally friendly, right?