I love carving pumpkins for halloween. There’s something timeless about carving a silly grin, or an awe-inspiring Predator face, into a pumpkin. The only problem is that its time consuming and rather messy for relatively little pay off. It’s about time we drag pumpkin carving into the future.

Brian, Eric and Alex VanDiepenbos must have had the exact same thoughts when they built the punkinBot. It’s a CNC machine that carves pumpkins instead of metal and other materials. In a way, it’s similar to 3D printers, but these machines create objects out of an already existing piece of metal, or in this case, pumpkins.

Here’s a video of the first carving done by the punkinBot at the Maker Faire in Detroit.

For a first run, it’s pretty impressive. It’s obviously a little rough around the edges, but the concept is solid. It’s still very much just a conceptual piece for now, but this could be a thing in the future. Talentless pumpkin carvers could bring a pumpkin into a shop to have a custom carving job done for them on a machine.

Even better, when will we able to just 3D print pumpkin-like material to create even more elaborate designs? It might be a little abstract, but what about a carve of the Eiffel Tower made entirely out of pumpkin-like material. The pumpkin carving masters might consider it cheating, but it would still be amazingly awesome.

[h/t: Make]