Let’s face it: if you can’t trust a fire-breathing billionaire industrialist to protect your stuff, who can you trust? (Video, embedded below.)
This one is straight out of the Really Bad Ideas™ files, and comes to us from [Marc Radinovic]. His story on this one is that he wants to protect the stuff in his new house, and felt that a face-recognition system with a flame thrower would be the best way to address that. And to somehow make it even better, said system would be built into a ridiculous portrait of everyone’s favorite plutocrat. The guts of the system are pretty much what you’d expect — a camera and a Raspberry Pi running OpenCV and a face recognition library, a butane reservoir and a solenoid valve, an arc lighter as an ignition source, and an Arduino and some completely not sketchy at all wiring to control all pieces. And LCD displays for [Elon]’s eyes, of course.
The system is trained to recognize [Marc]’s face and greets him cheerfully when he’s in view. [Non-Marc] people, however, are treated a bit less accommodatingly, up to and including a face-melting fireball. Effigies of other billionaires got the treatment; strangely, [Marc]’s face-recognition algorithm didn’t even recognize another [Mark] as a human face, which when you think about it is pretty darn funny.
So, certainly not a practical security system, and definitely not something you should build, but it’s pretty good fun anyway. It reminds us a bit of the fire-breathing duck we saw years ago.
Thanks to [JK] for the tip.
The project itself is very fun and well worthy of a hack.
Though why do so many revolve around public figures? After year long obsessions with orange guy, people will obsess now about spaceship guy.
American culture is always focused on the latest and greatest bad guy. Keeps the proles distracted, I guess.
It’s silly. I never understood people who thought Musk was ever 0.001% serious about getting to Mars. That spacecraft design is an absolute joke, there’s no way it would make the journey—much less so with a live human crew in a properly-designed habitat module. That said, selling bluechecks for eight bucks is primo comedy
So you don’t think he believes he’s going to Mars? I guess that’s a generous reading of the situation. He sure sounds confident to me, even if I don’t personally believe him.
I like how it didnt detect the face book clown as being human
Well, you can absolutely not trust him to protect _your_ stuff, but as it’s most likely gonna be his stuff pretty soon, it’ll probably be safe anyways :P
Butane burns too slow and might actually catch his house on fire. Years ago I did a similar build and found ether-based engine starting fluid to be ideal. Shoots farther, burns faster, and might even get the perp high!
LOL, the former tech hero suddenly becomes a pariah when he takes over a censoring safe space echo chamber with a goal of making it a free speech platform whose daily posters are 75% outside the US anyway and don’t care about stupid US politics.
Where do these tech companies that never turn a profit (and never will) get their constant torrent of VC money from? Look into this and you will start to understand some of the hysterics over the twitter takeover. They are state organs.
This will burn down your property. By the way, constructing this constitutes a booby trap and is a huge ATF violation. OP should dismantle it before he gets hit with a federal charge.
You a cop?
And just maybe he lives in a country where the ATF has no jurisdiction…
You must be a real hoot at parties
If I wanted a fire emitting asshole in my home, I’d light my farts.
With most cops thesedays being more interested in hunting down the authors of rude tweets, booby traps against intruders look a very reasonable option. But yes, they need to be a lot more targeted than a flame jet, maybe a very toughened adhesive net to ensnare intruders and hold them captive until you can run a little trial of your own (again state run courts too busy with prosecuting pensioners for selling mince pies to care about trying real criminals) and decide what justice to give the captured crook.
@TG (and other political commenters) This youtuber lists as location: Luxembourg.
And he has the blue L on the European plates of his car to support that claim it seems.
So don’t go too US-centric nuts now.