A Pumpkin Spice-Farting Jack-o’-Lantern Is the Perfect Halloween Trick

Before we get to this project, we need to clarify something: pumpkin spice does not contain any pumpkin. It is a spice used to make pumpkin pies, which is obvious when you hear the alternative “pumpkin pie spice” name. We simply associate the spice with pumpkins and fall, because of pumpkin pie and a very successful campaign from Starbucks. But The Man Cave imagined a world in which farmers harvest pumpkin spice from pumpkin farts, which is why they built this jack-o’-lantern that expels pumpkin spice-scented air freshener whenever it detects movement.

As we already established, pumpkin spice doesn’t come from pumpkins. But if pumpkins were flatulent, it would only make sense for their farts to smell like pumpkin spice. The Man Cave made that silly fiction a reality. The project started with a good old fashioned jack-o’-lantern with an appropriately demure expression, like a child who just smelt it and is waiting for you to figure out who dealt it. That expression isn’t purely there to sell the joke, but also to enable the underlying tech.

An ultrasonic sensor looks out at the world through the jack-o’-lantern’s carved eye holes. An Arduino Uno board monitors the ultrasonic sensor to detect movement. Hopefully that movement is a person walking up to the house, but it could also be a raccoon with a penchant for PSLs. When the Arduino sees movement, it tells a small hobby servo motor to rotate its arm to push down on the trigger of a Febreze air freshener bottle. That Febreze is pumpkin spice-scented, of course. The Febreze nozzle aims out of a hole on the jack-o’-lantern’s backside, completing the effect.

If we could make one suggestion, it would be to add a fart sound effect so that passersby understand what is happening. But aside from that small nit, we admire this project and are sure that neighborhood kids will love the gag this Halloween.