No honorable hacker or modder can be satisfied with a simple candle inside of a pumpkin.  How boring!  Us proud nerds step up and create unique, appealing, and downright stunning pumpkins complete with lasers, LEDs, robotics, motion sensors, whatever it takes!  Here are some of our DIY Halloween favorites:

• If all else fails, just build a gigantic pumpkin cannon and launch them.

Lasers and LEDs:

Learn to stuff a laser light show inside your pumpkin or stuff it full of LEDs which flash to music.  Check out the laser pumpkin featured at the top of the screen.

The SteamPunkin:

Based on the super popular steampunk craze, this pumpkin is fitted with plenty of gadgets including LEDs and motion sensor which shoots steam out of its ears when someone walks by.

Silly String Motion Sensor:

A simple motion sensing circuit using infrared LEDs and a servo motor sprays silly string at unsuspecting trick-or-treaters.  A superb, simple project to make your house unique.

Wireless Surveillance Pumpkin:

Although this project barely made the list since it involved little hacking, the concept is still pretty unique and worth a mention.

Super Mario 1-Up:

Instead of using the complex circuit in the pumpkin below, this project keeps it simple by flashing some RGB LEDs to create multicolored mushrooms from Super Mario brothers.

Color Changing Pumpkin:

Instead of buying store bought merchandise like the surveillance pumpkin above, this guy built a completely custom infrared sensing circuit to control the color of his pumpkin via a universal remote.

The Classic Cylon:

The classic “knight rider” circuit is a great edition to any pumpkin and is a simple, straightforward circuit to build.

The SpiderBot Pumpkin:

Even though this is a basic hexapod robot with a pumpkin on top, it’s still guaranteed to freak out trick-or-treaters.

Honorable Mention:

While these don’t involve electronics or circuitry, they’re still incredible and deserve to be part of this list.  Be sure to subscribe to HacknMod because you dont want to miss out on future DIY posts!

For your DIY Halloween costume this year, Learn how to make your own Ghostbusters Proton Pack equipt with red and green lasers (above).  There is a full tutorial on how to build your own along with a detailed photogallery of the proton pack.  An Arduino is used for basic controls of the various flashing and fading lights on the suit.

The video above walks you through some features of the DIY Halloween costume.  Included are some ecto goggles (seen below) and various other non-fuctional, but super cool-looking widgets.

The full tutorial walks you through the costume build and here’s a second tutorial to help you construct your own.  More of our favorite DIY costumes are featured below.

DIY Halloween Costumes & Projects:

• Exceptional Nerd-tastic Pumpkin Carvings
• Make your own MIB Halloween Costume
• DIY Gears of War Lancer & Chainsaw

The Dr. Frankenstein MAME cabinet is a retro gaming rig that takes inspiration from the monster novel. The steampunk cabinet is almost gothic in its design. Our previous post on DIY Arcade Rigs was about building an old styled arcade cabinet from the ground up. This Frankenstein build is just about giving the game rig a classically inspired touch.

These pictures above illustrate the building phases starting with the first woodwork. Every little touch adds to the antiquated appeal like the vintage panel meters on the control panel. Awesome detail!

The steampunk, mixed with the retro switches and gagues, and finally the rusted paintjob give it an astonishing vintage effect.  It took the builder about 60-80 hours of loving labor on the arcade rig. Not bad at all when you stand back and applaud a work of art.

Our other top arcade projects:

• Make your own Vintage Arcade Marquee
• Make your own Arcade Cabinet
• How to Build a DIY Nintendo Arcade

This steampunk enthusiast created his own retro-submarine themed steampunk house.  While the look of steampunk is pretty neat, this house might have gone too far by recreating a shipwrecked submarine. The engineer from Canterbury, New Zealand themed his playroom with his submarine shipwrecked on a deserted island.

Built at an absurd cost of $100,000, the 12-metre by 5.5m personal den definately resembles a rusting interior of a submarine (it better for that price). Complete with a working periscope and touches of ‘plutonium-leaking’ torpedoes. Custom wood MDF was sprayed with concrete and touched up to appear like rusting steel beams. Melted plastic sheets gave the look of bent steel torn apart when the submarine ran aground. Sound effects come from hidden speakers playing sonar and ocean sounds in the background.

But beyond the effects, the room also houses reclining chairs, a three-meter big-screen TV and a top-notch surround-sound system. A stocked bar made from materials likely to be found on an island completes the high living frills.

Related Theater Posts:

• Full DIY Home Theater Build: Start to Finish
• Tour of Segway Inventor Dean Kamen’s Geektastic Home
• DIY Stadium Seating for the Super Bowl

It’s certainly true that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.  Just take a look at these incredible works of art which have risen from the scrap piles, fashioned out of odds and ends. Some might call it junk art, but looking at the whole gallery of mechanical bots, we think the creative retro-vision is awe inspiring. It is not only the detailing on these mechanical guys but the fact that they were compiled completely of ‘junk’ and obsolete items.

Each robot is a sculpture…made from outdated (but vintage) stuff.  That’s why each piece stands unique in this collection of robotic scrap art.

From robots that look like the forefathers of C3PO to more sensuous robot shapes; we end with a small gallery of steampunk ray guns.  See all of our steampunk posts.

Don’t miss out on our impressive robotics tech we posted a little while back and check out these inspirational posts:

• Epic Collection of Sci-Fi Ray Guns
• Make a Steampunk Atomic Disruptor Raygun
• Incredible Circuitry Art with Spare Parts

Exceptional Steampunk Projects:

1. DIY Incredible Steampunnk Watches
2. For a vast assortment of steampunk projects
3. More info on this project

Want more steampunk?

• Make a Steampunk Nerf Gun
• Create a Ghetto Steampunk Lightsaber