Anti-Sanecraft ARTillery Cannon Is Farm Boy Engineering At Its Finest

The term “just enough knowledge to be dangerous” comes immediately to mind with this one. The official description is “a large scale pan and tilt propane Flame Effect” but that hardly does this thing justice. The Anti-Sanecraft ARTillery Cannon is a three-barrel fire cannon that can move around like its namesake and launch massive propane bursts from two 1″ diameter barrels. The third barrel is somewhat special, it is constructed of stronger steel and can be pre-fed with oxygen to create one massive intense propane-O2 mixed fire burst.

The trick about the whole thing is that when oxygen and propane are mixed it is a highly volatile and dangerous thing, in a closed space they classify as an explosive. Instead oxygen is filled directly into the open ended barrel separately and is allowed to sit until propane fires it out. This mixes the two fuels in the open air where it is safer and far away from any bystanders. We would not suggest you try this at all ever, as the effect was so loud during the Transformus festival that neighbors, miles away from the large festival ground, were complaining  about rattling windows. This is the kind of place where several thousand watt sound systems are pushed near the red with no issue, just to give a bit of a comparison.

We can’t seem to find a video of this thing in action either [Beyond Joy] just posted a video of this crazy contraption in action (without the O2 effect), check it out after the jump! Don’t forget to check the facebook photo album for all the NPT pipe fitting action, (warning some images of the phallic controls are very mildly NSFW).

Photo Credit: [Bert Reed Photography]

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I Build Stuff Too! Fire Cannon Edition

After hanging around festivals and burners for a bit I decided that it was finally time to show my stuff and actually build one of these crazy fire cannons everyone is always talking about.  The easiest way to go about this would have been to just follow plans from any given website: replace the valve from an empty grill tank with a 4 way fitting, add an electric solenoid, barrel, low pressure regulator (for the pilot), and then pipe in a regulated propane source. Easy.  The problem My problem with this stock fire cannon design is that it looks like every other fire cannon out there, you have your off the shelf propane bottle and a long thin copper barrel poking up from it, the fire is nice but the cannon is not very fun to look at. Also you can only fit a given size valve, and that does not allow for very much fuel to be released at once. This limits the size of the plume of fire, and where is the fun in that.  The central idea is to add lots of little bottles instead of one big one; I stumbled on a nice pretty anodized aluminum water manifold and the idea grew out from there.

Now, keep in mind I did not just set out to build this crazy thing out of nowhere and slap everything together without laying out some plans. I have been working with the folks over at Frank’s Kitchens for some time, and have been able to pick up a lot of safety practices and general safe handling procedure to keep myself from burning down the entire county. If you want to set out to make a flame effect that is great, but just read up on safety first and try to check out a fire cannon in person… That’s what I did and I still have most of my eyebrows as a result (no arm hair though).

Enough freaking text. Check out the video below for a tour!

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ATiny Powered Kinect Fire Cannons For Dance Fx

[Paul] is at it again with some kinect controlled fire poofers. You may remember [Paul’s] previous shenanigans with the gigantic hand made hydraulic flame-sailed pirate ship.  This time he is building a small flame poofer (possibly a series of poofers) for SOAK, a regional (unaffiliated) Burning Man style festival in Oregon.

Any one who remembers the build will recognize the brains of the new cannons, they are just the pirate ship’s custom ATiny board unceremoniously torn from their previous home and recycled for the new controller. This time though they have Kinect! The build seems to function much like the evil genius simulator by simply using a height threshold to activate each cannon, but [Paul] has plans for the new system. This hardware test uses the closed source OpenNI but will meet its full potential when it is reborn in SkelTrack, which was just released a few weeks ago. The cannons are going to go around a small single person dance floor, presumably with the Kinect nearby.

Check out the brief test video after the jump.

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