SPKY TV is a significant expansion of my annual singing pumpkin display. Everything is built around a small CRT TV playing an all Halloween TV station. Custom bumpers bookend retro commercial breaks that occur between programming. When the pumpkins do their thing, media takes over the TV and displays complementary visuals.

SPKY TV is powered by the open source broadcast simulation program FieldStation 42 running off a Raspberry Pi. The Pi’s output is then fed into an instance of OBS on the show computer through a capture card. When the scheduler that runs the pumpkins triggers a sequence, it sends a command over MIDI that is picked up by the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin in OBS. That command mutes the TV station audio and a window with the sequence media plays over the OBS output. A second MIDI command at the end of a sequence unmutes the TV stream.