Friday Hack Chat: Fire And Cars

July 4, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

Summer is here, and it’s time for the question on everyone’s mind: how are they going to get the fuselage of a 747 from the California desert to Burning Man? You can’t put it on a train, and it’s much wider than any truck.

This Friday, we’re not going to be answering the modern-day riddle of the Sphinx, but we are going to the talking about other art cars. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing dragons made out of school buses and pyrotechnics.

Our guest for this Hack Chat will be [Kevin Bracken], best known as the founder of International Pillow Fight Day, but now he’s the project lead fo Heavy Meta, Canada’s largest art car and fire-breathing dragon sculpture/stage. Heavy Meta is a 30-foot long mutant vehicle with flame effects and a 15,000 watt sound system. It’s also the 3tress, a 2,000 square foot workshop founded with the purpose of building this gigantic art car, and it’s the Toronto Art Car Community, a group of people tasked with manufacturing gigantic lumbering behemoths.

Kevin will be discussing how the Heavy Meta crew transformed a GMC school bus into a dragon, how the team learned to build flame effects, how the pneumatics work, and what it’s like to be on tour with half a dozen Maker Faires.

During this Hack Chat, we’ll be talking about:

What an art car is
How do you make the electronics
What precautions do you take to keep it working on the road
How do you control flame effects
What are the legal and regulatory considerations of art cars

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, July 6th. Here’s a clock counting down the time until the Hack Chat starts.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Émilie Du Châtelet: An Energetic Life

April 24, 2018 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Émilie du Châtelet lived a wild, wild life. She was a brilliant polymath who made important contributions to the Enlightenment, including adding a mathematical statement of conservation of energy into her French translation of Newton’s Principia, debunking the phlogiston theory of fire, and suggesting that what we would call infrared light carried heat.

She had good company; she was Voltaire’s lover and companion for fifteen years, and she built a private research institution out of a château with him before falling in love with a younger poet. She was tutored in math by Maupertuis and corresponded with Bernoulli and Euler. She was an avid gambler and handy with a sword. She died early, at 41 years, but those years that she did live were pretty amazing. Continue reading “Émilie Du Châtelet: An Energetic Life” →

Fire. Vortex. Cannon. Need We Say More?

April 18, 2018 by James Hobson 8 Comments

Tornadoes are a rightfully feared natural disaster. Fire tornadoes are an especially odious event to contend with — on top of whatever else is burning. But, a fire vortex cannon? That’s some awesome eye candy.

The madman behind this cannon belching huge gouts of fire is none other than Youtuber [JAIRUS OF ALL]. This build is actually an upgrade to one of his previous projects — a fire tornado gun that burned itself out and is now twice-revived — and is arguably better at creating a proper vortex to direct the flames. Built around a modified NERF gun, a pair of 60mm electric ducted fans with some additional venting — and tunable via a speed controller — direct the airflow through slits in a vortex chamber. A backpack of liquid propane literally fuels this phoenix of a flamethrower, so [JAIRUS] had plenty of time to put together some great footage. Check it out!

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Kapton: Miracle Material With A Tragic History

April 4, 2018 by Dan Maloney 64 Comments

On a balmy September evening in 1998, Swissair flight 111 was in big trouble. A fire in the cockpit ceiling had at first blinded the pilots with smoke, leaving them to rely on instruments to divert the plane, en route from New York to Geneva, to an emergency landing at Halifax Airport in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. But the fire raging above and behind the pilots, intense enough to melt the aluminum of the flight deck, consumed wiring harness after wiring harness, cutting power to vital flight control systems. With no way to control the plane, the MD-11 hit the Atlantic ocean about six miles off the coast. All 229 souls were lost.

It would take months to recover and identify the victims. The 350-g crash broke the plane into two million pieces which would not reveal their secrets until much later. But eventually, the problem was traced to a cascade of failures caused by faulty wiring in the new in-flight entertainment system that spread into the cockpit and doomed the plane. A contributor to these failures was the type of insulation used on the plane’s wiring, blamed by some as the root cause of the issue: the space-age polymer Kapton.

No matter where we are, we’re surrounded by electrical wiring. Bundles of wires course with information and power, and the thing that protects us is the thin skin of insulation over the conductor. We trust these insulators, and in general our faith is rewarded. But like any other engineered system, failure is always an option. At the time, Kapton was still a relatively new wonder polymer, with an unfortunate Achilles’ heel that can turn the insulator into a conductor, and at least in the case of flight 111, set a fire that would bring a plane down out of the sky.

Continue reading “Kapton: Miracle Material With A Tragic History” →

The Engineering Case For Fusing Your LED Strips

January 29, 2018 by Lewin Day 47 Comments

Modern LED strips are magical things. The WS2812 has allowed the quick and easy creation of addressable RGB installations, revolutionizing the science of cool glowy things. However, this accessibility means that it’s easy to get in over your head and make some simple mistakes that could end catastrophically. [Thomas] is here to help, outlining a common mistake made when building with LED strips that is really rather dangerous.

The problem is the combination of hardware typically used to run these LED strings. They’re quite bright and draw significant amounts of power, each pixel drawing up to 60 mA at full-white. In a string of just 10 pixels, the strip is already drawing 600 mA. For this reason, it’s common for people to choose quite hefty power supplies that can readily deliver several amps to run these installations.

It’s here that the problem starts. Typically, wires used to hook up the LED strips are quite thin and the flex strips themselves have a significant resistance, too. This means it’s possible to short circuit an LED strip without actually tripping the overcurrent protection on something like an ATX power supply, which may be fused at well over 10 amps. With the resistance of the wires and strip acting as a current limiter, the strip can overheat to the point of catching fire while the power supply happily continues to pump in the juice. In a home workshop under careful supervision, this may be a manageable risk. In an unattended installation, things could be far worse.

Thankfully, the solution is simple. By installing an appropriately rated fuse for the number of LEDs in the circuit, the installation becomes safer, as the fuse will burn out under a short circuit condition even if the power supply is happy to supply the current. With the example of 10 LEDs drawing 600 mA, a 1 amp fuse would do just fine to protect the circuit in the event of an accidental short.

It’s a great explanation of a common yet dangerous problem, and [Thomas] backs it up by using a thermal camera to illustrate just how hot things can get in mere seconds. Armed with this knowledge, you can now safely play with LEDs instead of fire. But now that you’re feeling confident, why not check out these eyeball-searing 3 watt addressable LEDs?

Continue reading “The Engineering Case For Fusing Your LED Strips” →

3D Print Yourself A Flame Thrower

December 5, 2017 by Lewin Day 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.

Mike Ossmann And Dominic Spill: IR, Pirates!

November 29, 2017 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

Mike Ossmann and Dominic Spill have been at the forefront of the recent wave of software-defined radio (SDR) hacking. Mike is the hardware guy, and his radio designs helped bring Bluetooth and ISM-band to the masses. Dominic is the software guy who makes sure that all this gear is actually usable. The HackRF SDR is still one of the best cheap choices if you need an SDR that can transmit and receive.

So what are these two doing on stage giving a talk about IR communication? Can you really turn traffic lights green by blinking lights? And can you spoof a TV remote with a cardboard cutout, a bicycle wheel, and a sparkler? What does IR have to do with pirates, and why are these two dressed up as buccaneers? Watch our video interview and find out, or watch the full talk for all of the juicy details.

Continue reading “Mike Ossmann And Dominic Spill: IR, Pirates!” →