Pumpkin Boy

Pumpkin Boy was a very quick build for a halloween party where I was meeting a bunch of school parents for the first time, because what says “I’m a cool person” more than carrying around a ball of wool stuffed with popsicle sticks and hot glue… Maybe it’s better to say I needed a comfort animal. If you know the song “Lemon Boy”, I spent the entire night with that tune stuck on repeat in my head, but with the words “Pumpkin Boy and meeeee we like to trick or treeeeeet toge-ether.” It really helped my conversational skills.

What is this expression even? A little bit worried, a little bit shy, a little bit why are my eyes pointing in different directions. Pumpkin Boy actually started out as an experimental one-servo-eye-rig, and everything else grew around that. The wonky-ness just means he is an adorable fit to the CrappyHappyRobots club.

Here’s his back. I’ve opened him up a little, but honestly, I didn’t make the orange wool wrapper quite large enough, and he naturally gapes open at the back a little. I’ll fix that at some point, maybe.

You can see the high quality micro:bit mounting technique, a.k.a. I tied it on with some elastic. (Why elastic??)

Here he is flipped inside out, and you can see how the entire structure is just made out of popsicle sticks glued together… It’s faster and less fussy than 3D printing.

Here you can see the eye rig mechanics. The vertical wire that acts as a pivot and holds the eye into the frame is encased in the eyeball resin during casting. If I did it again I would just hot glue it on like the servo linkage wire, because casting it cause the resin to flow up along the wire, which caused interference with the smoothness of the pivot.

The servo linkage wires are just bent at an angle and hot glued onto the eyeballs. It worked. The screw on the servo horn slides up and down the U slots formed by the wire as the servo horn swings back and forth.

I am reasonably happy with the eye motion, given the bare bones nature of the rig, and I’ll probably use it again.

Last, here you can kind of see the leg linkage. Each of those wires goes from one end of the servo horn, through a wire loop, and straight through the legs into the feet. The wire loop creates a pivot point, and the feet have a kind of pigeon toed twisty swing, that wasn’t exactly what I was picturing, but does fit in with the half-baked pumpkin boy vibe.

Overall the small round fuzziness of the wool combined with the heft of the batteries and hardware made Pumpkin Boy surprisingly snuggly and comforting to carry around. Now he’s tucked in next to Snowflake on a workshop shelf.