Halloween 2016

Halloween was a bit of an impromptu arrangement this year. I was at the iGEM Jamboree all weekend, and my wife and I only got home from Boston a little before 7 p.m. on Halloween, so we did not have time to carve a pumpkin this year.  Instead, I decided to improvise a very fast pumpkin surrogate:

First, I found a cardboard box large enough to hold the LED stroboscope that I had made for the mini Maker Faire.

Then I cut out a stencil pattern from a piece of heavy paper.

I made one mistake when cutting the stencil, cutting away the opaque center for the lower part of the B. I just used blue painter’s tape on the back of the paper to stick the piece back on, and recut the B.

Initially, I tried taping the stencil over the opening in the box, but the light was not diffuse enough—the individual LEDs were visible and the stencil pattern unclear. I then tried taping the stencil to the cutting mat and taping the cutting mat to the front of the box. It wasn’t very secure (painter’s tape is not very sticky—by design), but it worked for the evening.

The final result looked much better in the window than a 20-minute project had any right to.