Shane Wighton's Robot Puts Your Pumpkin Carving Kits to Shame

It’s that time of year again, when millions of people carve pumpkins to celebrate Halloween. Shane Wighton of the “Stuff Made Here” YouTube channel, however, doesn’t have to perform this task, as he’s instead made a robot to do it for him. This robot, which is based on/inspired by his previous hair cutting machine, uses a spindle and cutting bit to slash through the skin of a pumpkin, rather than clipping hair off of his head. Obviously one wouldn’t want to get the two mixed up!

In reality, while the initial plan was to modify the hair machine to “stand up to the rigors of CNC milling,” in the end pretty much all of it was discarded, with the exception of a large circular bearing in the middle, and the controls. The new apparatus first probes the pumpkin’s surface with a microswitch, and proceeds to map an image to it using a Mercator projection, normally used for map making. It can then either cut the edges of an image all the way through the pumpkin’s outer shell, or produce a lithophane, where different cut depths (254 in this case) are used to allow varying levels of light to filter through to the viewer.

Naturally the build process was fraught with some difficulty, including frying a number of components after swapping the + and – power input, and a driving gear that was loose, leading to very sloppy cuts. With these issues worked out, Wighton was able to make several pumpkin portraits, like a three-toothed all-the-way-through caricature of his daughter, a pumpkin image on a pumpkin, and a few less-than-flattering “pumpkimages” of his wife. As he puts it, “Just because something’s hard, it doesn’t mean that it’s good.” On the other hand each is certainly some of the best Mercator projection robotic pumpkin portraits ever made.