A few weeks ago, a friend sent me this link to a pretty great pumpkin carving. A big ol' menacing pumpkin with gourd horns and a smaller pumpkin resting on Gourd Horn's oversized tongue.
Fun stuff. "A" for effort. Who doesn't like cackling pumpkins threatening to cannibalize baby pumpkins? Not me.
Well, then this video of a pumpkin turned into an actual Tetris game came along and Gourd Horn has pretty much been forever ruined for me.
Minor league.
In fact, every carved pumpkin absent its own LED installation based on a nostalgic video game may as well be deposited for launch in the Roloff family pumpkin chunkin trebouchet.
The official Greatest Halloween Pumpkin Ever was built by Nathan Pryor, who posted the above video and also detailed how he built Pumpktris (his name, not ours, and perhaps the only imperfect part of his creation) on his blog.
He used 128 LEDs and did all the wiring, coding and very precise pumpkin carving himself. Pryor says the work took 12 hours over a week and a half -- and the high score so far is 9,800.
After assembling the LED connections, he explains that "To connect my own matrix to the I2C Backpack, I cut down a piece of prototyping board and soldered in the male headers, then connected the 8-inch wires from the last row and last column of the matrix to the board."
All of which sounds very difficult and impressive, but then he decided to turn the stem into the controller. To repeat: the STEM is the CONTROLLER.
Pryor even gave it a name: "I think I’m going to call this the "joystem" from now on, as disgusting as that may sound."
He's right. That is disgusting.
But it's OK because he turned a pumpkin into a game of Tetris.
Follow Jonathan on Twitter @JonFromHLN
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