False Profit Labs is happy to announce that we will be making appearances around the Bay Area in the coming months. First, on April 12 you can come out to NASA Ames at Moffett Field and enjoy our fire art out on the tarmac in celebration of Yuri’s Night. Check out their website here: www.ynba.org.Then on May 3 & 4 we bring more explosions to Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. More on this at: www.makerfaire.com.We’ll publish more details as we get them, but for now here’s an appetizing 3d model that Brendan Colloran made in Matlab(!) for the PyroCardium scultpure. Now it’s just a matter of building it.

In our latest workshop day, we got both The Hydrogen Economy V3 bubble machine prototype, and the 4-flame PyroCardium prototype working and ready for Maker’s Faire tryout day tomorrow at the Exploratorium. Then it was time for a little antics. Here’s a video of voice-controlled PyroCardium, held by Chris, exploding the bubbles or at least trying to.

They’re in.  And here they are so you can see not only what we’re up to this year for Burning Man, but also so you can get involved.  There are at least a dozen sub-projects related to The Hydrogen Economy and PyroCardium.  Maybe you want to help with construction of a double-helix sculpture, or you’re good at machining small plastic and metal parts.  Maybe you have no skills at all but are full of enthusiasm.  Perfect.  Post a comment with your contact info and we’ll find a way to plug you into the mix.The 2008 False Profit Labs Burning Man Proposals:

The Hydrogen Economy

PyroCardium

I ordered the control board for the new bubble machines today. I’m trying a new circuit board fab house, PCBFabExpress, which is cheaper than the place I’ve used before. The boards should be here on the 12th, after which I get to assemble them. This will be interesting as I’m using a 20 pin surface mount chip for the H-bridge motor driver, which is a bigger surface mount package than I’ve worked with before. You can see a snapshot of the board design below. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to import the FP labs logo into my PCB design software, so I didn’t get to brand the boards as I wanted to.

The Hydrogen Bubble Machine V3 prototype is moving right along, and now we’ve attached two bubble wands to our central rotating plastic rod. I tried using different diameter wands and two needle valves to demonstrate differing flow rates. Next step Kurt’s fabbing our circuit boards for the motor controller.We had designed an ingenious little optical sensor with a veined wheel to indicate when the wands are in the up and down positions, but now we think this design can be simplified with a couple of microswitches and some stops mounted on the side panel. A screw on the axle will tap the microswitch and inform the microcontroller that the wands have reached the downward (dipping) position. The microcontroller will then reverse the motor until the other microswitch is tapped, when the wands will be in the upward (blowing) position. At this point the microcontroller will turn on the solenoid, releasing our hydrogen gas mixture and blowing bubbles for a certain (adjustable) time period. Then the microcontroller will repeat the process.I’ve mocked up this prototype using a three-way toggle switch and connecting the solenoid manually to a battery. Here’s a video showing the latest testing: