3D Print A Remote Control Flame Thrower

June 12, 2018 by 11 Comments

We all have a weakness for a good flamethrower project, but sometimes they can look a little hairy, even if losing hairs to them seems to be the order of the day. [Hyper_Ion] has a ‘thrower that might satisfy the need for fire among the cautious though, because he’s created a remote control flamethrower.

Fuel for the flames is provided from a butane canister held within a 3D-printed frame, and is delivered via a piece of copper tube to a welding nozzle. A plunger beneath the can is connected to a rack-and-pinion driven by a servo, connected to a straightforward radio control receiver. The position of the can is adjusted until there is just enough gas to sustain a pilot flame at the nozzle, and a command to the servo releases a burst of gas that results in a satisfying puff of fire.

This is more of a static stage effect than the wearable flamethrowers or flamethrower guitar projects we’ve seen in the past, but it is no less a neat project. And unlike many other flamethrowers, it’s simple to build. We have to deliver the usual exhortation though: take care with your fire, we’d prefer not to be writing either obituaries of Fail Of The Week posts about smoking ruins.

3D Print Yourself A Flame Thrower

December 5, 2017 by 20 Comments

For a large proportion of the world’s population, it’s now winter, which means there’s plenty of rain and snow to go around. With the surrounding environment generally cooler and wetter than usual, it’s a great time to experiment with dangerous flame based projects, like this wrist mounted flame thrower.

It’s a build that does things in both a simple and complicated way, all at once. Fuel is provided by a butane canister with a nozzle that needs to be pressed to release the gas.  A servo is used to push the canister into a 3D printed housing, releasing the gas into a pipe to guide the fuel towards the end of the user’s wrist. The fuel is then ignited by a heated coil of wire. The heated wire and the servo are both controlled by standard radio control gear typically seen on RC cars or buggies. Using the brushed speed controller to run the heated coil is particularly off-beat, but it does the job admirably.

Overall, it goes without saying that this build presents some serious risks of burns and other injuries. However, the fundamental premise is sound, and it does what it says on the tin with parts that could be readily found in the average junk box.

For another take on a wrist-mounted flame thrower, check out this version using a scavenged solenoid valve.

RC Mini Flame Thrower Brings The Burn

December 16, 2015 by 17 Comments

It goes without saying that a radio controlled mini flame thrower can be nothing but a bad idea and you should never, ever build one. But once you watch the video below, you’ll be tempted to try. But don’t do it – you’ve been warned.

That said, the video below shows that [Make-log]’s remarkably compact build is chock full of safety interlocks and sports a thoughtful and informative user interface. It’s fueled by a small can of spray deodorant whose valve is actuated by a servo and ignited by a spark-gap igniter. Alas, this final critical component is no longer available from SparkFun, so if you choose to roll your own – which you shouldn’t – you’ll need to find a substitute.

We’ve featured an unreasonable number of flame thrower projects before, including a ton of wrist–mounted units. Of course if you’re a musically inclined pyromaniac, you’ll also want to check out this mini Doof Warrior setup too.

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Improved Arm Mounted Flame Thrower

November 3, 2009 by 72 Comments

prometheus-flame-thrower[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?

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Exhaust Flame Throwers

March 3, 2006 by 50 Comments

flamethrower

Here’s a hack that’s been around since the very start of the hot rod movement. Car exhaust flame throwers work by interrupting the spark to the engine. This dumps raw fuel into the exhaust system. The fuel is ignited by a coil and spark plug placed right before the exhaust tip. Doing this will shorten the life of your engine (and pedestrians). The raw fuel strips the oil off the cylinder walls and contaminates the oil causing more wear and tear. Also, this mod can’t be used on a fuel injected car. It would foul the O2 sensors and catalytic converter. Never the less, our fascination with electricity will live on.

[thanks matticus66]

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Flamethrower weedkiller mounted on a robot arm riding a tank tracked base

Don’t Sleep On The Lawn, There’s An AI-Powered, Flamethrower-Wielding Robot About

September 11, 2021 by 25 Comments

You know how it goes, you’re just hanging out in the yard, there aren’t enough hours in the day, and weeding the lawn is just such a drag. Then an idea just pops into your head. How about we attach a gas powered flamethrower to a robot arm, drive it around on a tank-tracked robotic base, and have it operate autonomously with an AI brain? Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Let’s do that. And so, [Dave Niewinski] did exactly that with his Ultimate Weed Killing Robot.

And you thought the robot overlords might take a more subtle approach and take over the world one coffee machine at a time? No, straight for the fully-autonomous flamethrower it is then.

This build uses a Kinova Robots Gen 3 six-axis arm, mounted to an Agile-X Robotics Bunker base. Control is via a Connect Tech Rudi-NX box which contains an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX Edge AI computing engine. Wow that was a mouthful!

Connectivity from the controller to the base is via CAN bus, but, sadly no mention of how the robot arm controller is hooked up. At least this particular model sports an effector mount camera system, which can feed straight into the Jetson, simplifying the build somewhat.

To start the software side of things, [Dave] took a video using his mobile phone while walking his lawn. Next he used RoboFlow to highlight image stills containing weeds, which were in turn used to help train a vision AI system. The actual AI training was written in Python using Google Collaboratory, which is itself based on the awesome Jupyter Notebook (see also Jupyter Lab on the main site. If you haven’t tried that yet, and if you do any data science at all, you’ll kick yourself for not doing so!) Collaboratory would not be all that useful for this by itself, except that it gives you direct, free GPU access, via the cloud, so you can use it for AI workloads without needing fancy (and currently hard to get) GPU hardware on your desk.

Details of the hardware may be a little sparse, but at least the software required can be found on the WeedBot GitHub. It’s not like most of us will have this exact hardware lying around anyway. For a more complete description of this terrifying contraption, checkout the video after the break.

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Mind-Controlled Flamethrower

May 12, 2021 by 16 Comments

Mind control might seem like something out of a sci-fi show, but like the tablet computer, universal translator, or virtual reality device, is actually a technology that has made it into the real world. While these devices often requires on advanced and expensive equipment to interpret brain waves properly, with the right machine learning system it’s possible to do things like this mind-controlled flame thrower on a much smaller budget. (Video, embedded below.)

[Nathaniel F] was already experimenting with using brain-computer interfaces and machine learning, and wanted to see if he could build something practical combining these two technologies. Instead of turning to an EEG machine to read brain patterns, he picked up a much less expensive Mindflex and paired it with a machine learning system running TensorFlow to make up for some of its shortcomings. The processing is done by a Raspberry Pi 4, which sends commands to an Arduino to fire the flamethrower when it detects the proper thought patterns. Don’t forget the flamethrower part of this build either: it was designed and built entirely by [Nathanial F] as well using gas and an arc lighter.

While the build took many hours of training to gather the proper amount of data to build the neural network and works as the proof of concept he was hoping for, [Nathaniel F] notes that it could be improved by replacing the outdated Mindflex with a better EEG. For now though, we appreciate seeing sci-fi in the real world in projects like this, or in other mind-controlled projects like this one which converts a prosthetic arm into a mind-controlled music synthesizer.

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