We’ll be at the LA Coliseum this weekend for Electric Daisy Carnival playing with fire for the likes of Thievery Corporation, Groove Armada, Paul Oakenfold and The Crystal Method.

If you’re in the Los Angeles Area, come by and see your heartbeat projects in a ring of 40 torches. Every palpitation of your pattering heart signals giant bursts of fire.

False Profit Labs in Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-guidefeature25-2009jun25,0,12845.story

Every morning of the weekend, we spent a couple of hours guiding Coachella campers through making their first fire sculpture! Here’s a photo of one of the final flame trees…see more photos on the false profit labs flickr group

This just in…”[PyroCardium] gives people a real interactive way to experience their own body and it looks very cool,” said Dustin Boyer at Coachella.  This according to The Desert Sun in a report about the Coachella art.  The False Profit Labs crew is also helping people make their own free badass fire sculptures.  PyroCardium runs nightly, and if you’re at the festival you can catch our last Flame Tree Studio in General Camping this morning.

http://www.mydesert.com/article/20090418/EVENTS17/904180319

…beats PyroCardium!

Come play with PyroCardium at the Coachella Festival this month - April 17, 18, 19 in Indio, CA.

Your heart stokes your body’s inner fire— watch it stoke a spiral fire that blasts into the sky!
Clip on the pulse monitor at this sculpture by False Profit Labs and feel forty fireballs bursting in a gorgeous spiral around you, pulsing to the rhythm of your heart for all to see.

And if you’re inspired to learn some basics about propane fire art (who wouldn’t be), we will be teaching Flame Tree Workshops! The workshops are free for on-site campers and take place Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10am-1pm.

Come make fire art for your own backyard!

False Profit Labs made its east coast debut at Boston Decompression on November 8th. Boston’s Decom was a 300 person party in a warehouse loft space that ran from 8pm till about 8am. The smaller size and indoor nature of the event along with the near impossibility of getting permission to run large scale fire at public events in Boston meant that we presented the LED version of Pyrocardium. The project was set in the main room of the party so we were able to get dancers with fast heartbeats to try it out and cause much high speed flashing. Some people would hang out long enough to calm their heart rates and watch the corresponding visuals slow down which they very much enjoyed. Overall, both the Pyrocardium and the party in general went off exceedingly well.

You can find pictures of Boston Decom here: http://bostonburners.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=46357 (sadly I have not been able to find pictures of the Pyrocardium installation)

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

For a while now I have been talking about hooking up the Emotiv headset brain computer interface (http://emotiv.com/) to the Pyrocardium and this Thursday we managed to pull it off.

What you see in this video is me in a headset actively trying to turn on the fire with my mind. You can tell I am trying to turn on the fire by when I am holding out my hand. I find using a gesture generally helps me focus on a very precise thought. The thought to turn on fire in this case was to imagine the look and sound of the fire and “will” the fire into existence using psychic energy coming out of my forehead. I realize the part about the forehead energy sounds a little flaky but the neat thing is that it works quantitatively better.

To get to this point, I trained the system to recognize the thought pattern for setting things on fire with my mind. This was done using software Emotiv distributes to developers. I took the output of this software, interpreted it some, and then wrote to the USB controller board that runs the Pyrocardium. And then fire happened!

A few other people (Wanda, Kurt, Zack, and Bash) were also able to try the headset and make fire with there thoughts. They seemed pretty pleased with the results. : )

Also, in the video is Zack spraying color fire stuff into the flame to turn it red. Neato!

Oh, and big thanks to Bash who brought the headset, software, and laptop that allowed all this to happen.

A while back I posted about my first attempts to make a stethoscope amplifier as an input to PyroCardium.  This has worked well, though it has required some tweaking since then. First, it turned out that the resistor network used to power the electret mike and to bias the output signal to within the range of the single supply op-amp I’m using was too low resistance, and was substantially loading the relatively high impedance output of the electret. Secondly, getting a good seal between the microphone and the stethoscope tubing is critical for getting a decent signal out. Tweaking those things gave us a setup that worked pretty well for Alchemy and Maker Faire.

That said, there are some definite problems with our current stethoscope/microphone setup. First, it turns out it’s surprisingly hard to position the stethoscope on your chest to really pick up your heartbeat, especially as our current setup doesn’t have audio feedback so you can hear whether you’ve found it or not. Secondly, the stethoscope does a pretty good job of picking up ambient noise.  It works great it a quiet room but less well at a noisy, crowded event.  In fact I was able to get it to trigger on the beats of the music playing at Alchemy with just a little tweaking. This is great for some other things we have in mind for Priceless but less good for picking up your heartbeat.

So, we’d like to find a better system for Burning Man.  Ideally we’d like something where there’s no ambiguity about where to place the sensor and a sensor that robustly picks up your heartbeat, regardless of environmental noise, the fact that you’re running in place, or anything else.  So far we’ve had two ideas - use some kind of simple EKG system, or use a pulse oximeter.  This weekend I tried building this simple EKG circuit but met with no success whatsoever - all I could see at the output was 60 Hz line noise.  I’m not really sure why (the high common-mode rejection ratio of the instrumentation amp is supposed to take care of that) but I’m not sure I have the skill set to make it work.  I’m also not sure that this EKG system will be robust enough or easy enough to use on the playa, and there are also safety issues with hooking it up to a line powered system.

So, my current plan is to buy a cheap pulse oximeter and see if we can rip it apart and get it to interface to a PC.  If anyone out there reading this knows about pulse oximeters and how to do this let me know.  Also, if you’re good at analog design and want to make the ekg circuit work, that would be good too :).