Ada “loooooves” pumpkins and Ada “loooooves” robots so we decided to combine the two in our latest project.

The first line of business was having Ada draw a face on her pumpkin. There was no help from me on this one aside from handing her a sharpie.

The next step was carving out the eyes and mouth for the lights. No worries, dad did that.

Ada is so proud of her pumpkin!

The messy part was over so we moved on to what Ada calls “Testing” or “Making robots”. Why does she call it testing? Well, I have an old multimeter that she uses to probe old motors and electronic components while I work on electronics projects in the kitchen. Testing went well on this particular night as we ended up with a blinking LED circuit that will end up being the robot part of the pumpkin.

Ada was so focused during this part of the project that this was all the smile she could muster.

Oh, yeah. What kind of a robot pumpkin would this be without an on/off switch.

The old guts went out and the new electronic guts went in.

 

To center the LED pupils in the eyes of the pumpkin we used old paperclips.

Annnnnd… There. All done.

Now let’s turn it on.