Let This Pumpkin Head Dish Out Halloween Candy for You

With Halloween just around the corner, YouTuber “brankly” has created an automatic candy dispenser that looks like a lot of fun. The build features a gigantic pumpkin head that spits treats out of its tongue-slide, sitting on top a much smaller skeleton for a hilarious look. An illuminated bowl catches the candy that comes out, and a large button, which can be placed on the ground as a foot switch, starts the device up.

A Home Depot bucket is used to house the dispensing system inside the head, chosen for its orange color. The giant faux jack-o'-lantern was, somewhat ironically, purchased at Lowes. This bucket contains a turntable for candy which is spun on a lazy susan bearing assembly with a stepper and printed gears. As the turntable advances, the candy is pushed to the outside until it falls out the 3D-printed slide, and detected with a pair of IR sensor modules. This triggers the bowl underneath to light up under relay control, while the turntable moves in the opposite (counterclockwise) direction to keep extra candy from falling out.

Head lighting and sound effects are via the stock module salvaged from the giant pumpkin, and RGB LEDs are added to the button assembly using an Arduino Nano installed in its enclosure. Overall control of the project is by another Arduino Nano on a custom PCB, which includes a driver board and voltage regulator. The build looks like a lot of fun in the video and STLs/code is available on Thingiverse.