This hacked garden gnome hilariously screams when someone picks it up

YouTuber Gavin Scott (AKA Make Fun Stuff) and his friend Kevin have been pranking each other with garden gnomes for years. In the video below, Scott decided to take things to a new level, placing an Adafruit sound board and speaker into one of these small ceramic creatures to make it scream when picked up. The system is triggered via an LDR sensor, along with an Arduino Nano to interpret this input and start the sound.

It’s a fairly straightforward project, though it was certainly a challenge actually getting all the electronics stowed inside the gnome. Results are seen at the end of the clip, where Kevin seems genuinely confused as to how this little guy showed up on his doorstep.

Code and a circuit diagram for the build can be found here.