Musical Jack-O'-Lantern Lighting

Once again it’s October, meaning Halloween and the corresponding light-up decorations, presenting an excellent opportunity to show off your hacking expertise. In this project, Aaron Eiche outlines how he created a coordinated array of hacked jack-o'-lanterns that illuminate to music. It's a fun project, which could be readily duplicated or adapted to other situations as needed.

The build started out a few years ago, with the purchase of a number of discounted faux jack-o'-lanterns. These light up with a flickering candle effect, and came with a “try me” button that would seem perfect for external control and coordination. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth (even with its interesting motor-and-reflector flame effect) and the guts were instead swapped out for addressable WS2812B LEDs in each pumpkin.

These newly LED-enabled pumpkins are connected together via three-connector pigtails. Wiring is well-secured internally, using NASA-style splice/solder joints encased in hot glue and heat shrink.

The entire thing is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3 running Falcon Player, along with a USB “sound card” that allows it to multiplex both lights and audio. Power is provided by a 12V supply for the setup’s audio amplifier, plus a 5V supply for the Pi and pumpkin LEDs.

The build shows off a number of techniques that could be applied to other Halloween projects (or for other holidays as well). The results, demonstrated below, look quite nice. Note that sound was added later, per syncing and noise issues.