PyroCardium, our newest interactive fire sculpture was a hit at Fire Arts Festival. 40 flame effects igniting in quick succession all around you every time your heart beats. Just pick up the stethoscope, place it on your chest, and the flames will certainly send an adrenaline shot that will amp up your pulse. Resuscitation please!

KTVU did a nice piece including False Profit Labs. You can watch the video here: http://www.ktvu.com/video/16839645/index.html

PyroCardium at Fire Arts Festival

The Hydrogen Economy was also in full effect with brand new modularized entirely clear plastic bubble machines. More bubbles, more explosions. And finally, the appropriate labels to add to the propane and oxygen knobs. You see, the bubbles are always full of hydrogen, but adding a bit of oxygen makes them go boom, and adding propane makes them flash.

Hydrogen Economy Control Panel

Enjoying a few exploding bubbles.

PyroCardium, our newest sculpture in the form of 40 flame effects that visualize your heartbeat in fire, will make its debut at Fire Arts Festival in Oakland this week. If you’ve kept up with our blog or come to Maker Faire, you’ve seen our small spiral prototype. Well, this is something quite different: a 20-foot diameter ring with 40 flame pipes stretching out at all sorts of angles. Now you get to place our stethoscope to your heart while you are inside the ring of fire.

Fire Arts Festival is Wednesday through Saturday, July 9-12 at night near The Crucible in Oakland. We’ll have PyroCardium, and of course our exploding hydrogen bubbles will be popping in The Hydrogen Economy as well. Ticket information can be found here: http://www.thecrucible.org/fireartsfestival/ . Fire Arts Festival is easily accessible by BART from anywhere in the Bay Area.

PyroCardium First Light: A video from setup at Fire Arts Festival

We’re very happy to be installed in our new double-wide container in The Shipyard. In case you haven’t heard of The Shipyard, it’s really an incredible facility run by Jim Mason and Jess Hobbs. There are huge machine tools, mini “hardware stores”, ample common areas for building large-scale sculptures, and shipping containers where resident artists can store their wares.

One of the best things about being over there is everyone’s willingness to show us around, show us the quirks and conventions of using a gigantic lathe, or help install a capacitor to get the drill press working. And that’s even after we accidentally busted up a couple projects on move-in day! It seems it’s a constant shuffle moving huge items around. Luckily there’s a forklift that could literally lift a house to manage the work.

We’re in full production for Priceless this July 4 weekend and Fire Arts Festival coming up July 9-12. At Priceless, PyroCardium will be pulsing to heartbeats in its original spiral form. Ben is creating massive colored flame effects in the river for a new project called Toxic Bloom. We’re bringing along “Sputnik”, our custom heat exchanger to power a River Hot Tub. And I’ll be teaching a Flame Tree Workshop.

“Sputnik” heat exchanger on the Ocean Beach flower bloom heating our inflatable hot tub.

Ben tests an accumulator effect for Toxic Bloom.

False Profit Labs is proud to bring The Hydrogen Economy and PyroCardium to Maker Faire. Especially now that our circuitboards work! The last few days have been a bit harrowing, since the first time we fired up all twenty of our the flame effects, we blew up our power supply. Kurt Thorn revisioned the electronics in 24 volts DC instead of the high-voltage AC line we were using and at 11:30pm last night PyroCardium came to life.

We’re jamming a lot of technology into this project of computer-controlled fire. The little sculpture is a prototype, with a 20-foot-tall spiral to follow for Burning Man in August. It has 16 flame effects, each a small propane venturi flame pipe with a solenoid valve. All the flames are fired individually by a USB-connected driver board controlled by a False Profit Labs software application that runs various flame algorithms. Each algorithm changes the response and patterns of the flame. And at Maker Faire on Saturday from 6-10pm you can place the PyroCardium stethoscope on your chest and see your heartbeat race up the sculpture in a spiral of flames.

PyroCardium’s first test-run

I’m teaching a Flame Tree workshop at Alchemy on Saturday, April 26 after the Fashion Show. In this 2-hour construction class, you will get to build your very own propane flame effect. It’s called a propane burner, one of the simplest to create, and produces up to about 25 flames with 4″ tails. You will be provided with all materials and tools, except your own propane which you can pick up at any hardware store.

Here are some pictures of Flame Trees that people made at our first workshop:

Skills you’ll learn include: plumbing gas lines, making a flare fitting, leak checking, hardening and drilling copper tubing. Send mail to brett at false dash profit dot com if you want to sign up. The class is $40 and includes a free Alchemy ticket.

False Profit Labs has received grants from Burning Man for both The Hydrogen Economy and PyroCardium. We’re honored and really excited. Even though we’ve come a long way on the projects, there is much work to be done. I think that along with these grants comes the responsibility to deliver, and to bring what we’ve promised in our proposals to life out on the playa.

Since we had to put the proposals online quickly for this week’s Jack Rabbit Speaks (JRS), I dumped images out of the proposal PDF files and made these online versions.

The Hydrogen Economy
PyroCardium

I didn’t have much luck with the PDF to HTML conversion tools, so if you know of a good one, please post it.

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.

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

Last night (January 15, 2008) at the False Profit Community meeting we were given the official go-ahead to start using the name False Profit Labs. So, first thing I did was set up this blog, and next we’ll have a wiki and a new email list. I’ll be the Creative Director at least for this quarter, and will be speaking with everyone in our community about the labs, hoping to be the facilitator in making this endeavor inclusive and fun.

Please contact me if you have a project you want to make, especially involving fire or other science-inspired artwork. If you have ideas or feedback about False Profit Labs as an organization, it’s goals and mission, drop me a line as well.