Tomorrow’s turkey day here in the United States. Do you fully expect your trashy neighbor to burn down his house while trying to cook a holiday feast? To see what’s in store for your neighborhood we’ve rounded up a great collection of idiots deep frying turkeys. Read the rest of this entry »
[Everett] is at it again with Prometheus, an arm mounted flame thrower.This is the third generation of the project and makes some huge advances over the second generation we saw last year. We’d say he’s reached cinema/stage-performance quality with his design.
The self-contained system is completely arm mounted with a fuel reservoir mounting behind the elbow. The new version adds an adjustable flow valve actuated by a servo motor to regulate the flame size. An arc generator has been incorporated to replace the lighter from the last version. A microcontroller measures wrist angle and takes care of creating the arc and regulating the fuel supply.
Prometheus is small, controllable, and frightening. See a full demonstration as well as some video of the prototyping process after the break. Does this make you wonder how much burn cream [Evertt's] needed over the years?
After we posted the “High explosives pc case” earlier we saw a resounding outcry in the comments for combustible destruction. Oddly enough, we got a submission of something along just those lines. [tazzik] has taken the heat sink off of his athlon 1400+ and covered the poor processor in potassium chlorate. As you can see in the video, this was not a very effective heat management decision. It is definitely fun, but nowhere near as explosive as our thermite shenanigans.
[thanks Steve]
Artist [Ariel Schlesinger] has managed to replace an air horn’s compressed air tank with butane fuel. This hack manages to change the pitch of the horn slightly, as well as making one very noisy flamethrower. While not as impressive as other flamethrowers, this would probably take the cake for most achievable. Currently the site containing the how-to is down, but we would have to recommend not doing this at home anyway. Video after the jump.
The Serpent Mother is certainly an appropriate name for this 168foot long snake fire art installation filled with enough goodies to impress anyone who is into flame effects. [The Flaming Lotus Girls] were allocated $60,000 in May of 2006 to bring this art project to Burning Man. A team of nearly 100 people worked together at a furious pace to pull it off. The collaboration of skill-sets is unfathomable between the metal art, firmware, software, LEDs, and propane design. The primary flames consist of 41 “poofers” along the spine of the serpent each one capable of delivering a 8′ tall flame. Tucked away near the tail is a egg that makes use of methanol and boric acid to create a massive green fireball. When the egg is open nobody is allowed with 150′ of the project. The brain that runs the beast is nothing more than a RS-485 network of humble ATmega8s. The microcontrollers are wired with XLR cable and chatting at a 19200 baud. Max/MSP is used on a laptop to control flame patterns. Here is a enjoyable write-up and video. We particularly enjoy the bit about the strange looks the team got when purchasing 50 stun guns.
Regular submitter [Jared Bouck] from Inventgeek.com has sent us this cool project. He wanted to make a fireball cannon, but didn’t want to settle for plain old fireballs.Instead of using a common propane system, he built an alcohol based one so he had a “blank slate” to start with. He then applied some copper chloride to get the desired greens and blues. With all of the fire displays we see, how come we don’t see more colored flames? Check out the overview video after the break.
[PodeCoet] sent in this mod he did to a Spider Fire flashlight. These things are unbelievably bright, they use Cree LEDs that are so intense, they can ignite paper. [PodeCoet] notes that they run on fairly expensive batteries. Instead of buying some rechargeable ones, he decided to customize and hack his torch. He added a custom charging circuit and a Lilon battery as well as a boost-converter circuit and a status LED. We like the idea of having a rechargeable lamp, but he has lost his water proofing. If anything, you should go there to see his nicely done smd charger pcb as well as the pictures of his test run, burning some paper.
As some people have pointed out in the comments, this flashlight could not have started that fire. This one could though.
After the overwhelming response to the Hackit we posted about automated hard drive destruction last fall, we finally decided to test out some thermite hard drive destruction ourselves. This has been done on The Screen Savers but they did not show up close results of the platters. So, aluminum and black iron oxide were procured through eBay, and until it arrived we watched some YouTube videos that showed a lot of fire and no real results. We decided to see what it would take to completely obliterate a drive.
With the amount of personal data stored on your computer, we all understand the importance of destroying the data that is stored on the platters of a hard drive before disposing of it. There are many ways to destroy a hard drive; software, physical disassembly, drills, hammers, magnets/electromagnets, and acid, but none are quite as outrageous and dangerous as thermite. That’s what we’re going to do here today. Follow along for pictures and videos of the results.
Builder [Justin Gray] brought a pair of electric motorcycles to Maker Faire last weekend. Pictured above is the R84, which has 28 LiFePo cells and an 84v AC induction drive providing 54HP. All of that is stuffed in a 2000 Yamaha R1 frame. You can buy it now for $14,000.
[everett] sent in his final project for his mechanisms class. In an attempt to create his own bolt on X gene, he built a wrist mounted hand activated flame thrower: The Pyro System. The wrist mount has an igniter and a nozzle for dispersing fuel. When he flexes his hand back, a switch actuates a servo on the fuel and fires the igniter. Quick disclaimer: Don’t try replicating this one! If you want to skip the movie clip, skip 33 seconds into the video.
Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web and a special How-To hack each week.
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