For those who celebrate Halloween, October is spooky season. As the northern hemisphere heads into the chill of winter, and the Southern Hemisphere warms up towards summer, October is a month of ghost, ghouls, and other scary things like bugs in your code and failing unit tests 😱.

Pumpkins are a great way to decorate your house, even better if they are powered by cool tech, and light up or make spooky sounds. Sam Wronski and I decided it would be fun to create some Tech or Treat pumpkins.

Check out the 10-second video below to see what I created.

This was using a Raspberry Pi, some programmable LEDs (WS2812Bs, or NeoPixels as they are also known), and a little bit of Python. Add in some Azure IoT central and I have internet controlled pumpkins.

Sam created these beauties:

Sam used some cool .NET IoT bindings to control the LEDs. It's always great when there are multiple ways to do something using the technology you know and love!

We had a live stream showing how we got our pumpkins lit up, and you can watch the video below:

If you want to create a pumpkin yourself, check out our Tech or Treat GitHub repo to see some examples of how we did each part, and maybe build your own pumpkin and share it with us!

Lights are for life, not just for Halloween. You can take these code samples and use them for lights for any festive occasion, cool outfit, or just because you can.

And if you do - please share in the comments below!