Here’s the layout for Carbon Garden as it will appear on the playa this year at Burning Man.  The four gates will be each have two flaming carbon fiber towers, and infrared sensors to trigger music and flame behaviors as people enter and exit.  We’ll be located 700 feet from the man along the invisible 4:30 line on your clock dial, pretty near to the Tea House, so it will indeed be quite a zen corner of the desert.

Oh, you’re the PDF type?

Our first 10′ tall carbon flower with a 42″ diameter bloom.  Here’s a video showing what the flowers look like before trimming and stem attaching.  This stem is also our first one made of pure carbon fiber.  We used a biaxial twill sleeve from Soller Composites and laid it up over foam pool noodles.  After applying epoxy the stretchy sleeve is folded to create a ribbing effect similar to bamboo.

Check out the Hot Preview on KTVU.com about Fire Arts Festival. Some nice coverage of the event including Carbon Garden.

Video: http://www.ktvu.com/video/20046933/
Slideshow: http://www.ktvu.com/slideshow/entertainment/20046824/detail.html

Setup at Fire Arts Festival: KTVU Photo

We’re fully underway with carbon fiber flower petal production.  In addition we’ll start bending and hammering steel stems in the forge pretty soon, and we’ve got decent mechanical designs for the interfaces to hold petals, leaves and stems together.  On the flame effect side, our Flame Elements now have built in ultrasonic rangefinders that auto shutoff if people get too close.  The garden is laid out  to allow good participant flow but prevent cars from driving in there.

Here are some renderings by Andy Lee showing how a simple petal shape can be repeated and attached at different points to create a wide variety of flowers.

Any opinions or ideas you’d like to pass to us?  Also, if anyone knows people who are interested in learning how to lay up carbon fiber, we’re getting pretty good at it these days and always welcome visitors to the shop.  False Profit Labs workshop days are Wednesdays from 6-10pm and Saturdays from 1-5pm in San Francisco.  Early versions of Carbon Garden will appear at the American Steel opening party and Fire Arts Festival in July.  Email: brett at false dash profit dot com if you want to get involved.

Rendering of Carbon Garden at Burning Man by Erik Walker

After a minute of cleaning up the playa dust from Burning Man, and playing on the river at Priceless, we are now home, semi-rested and are happy to report that the desert was good. Setup took three days in the hot sun, cold nights, and ever-present dust. Everything broke, such as manifolds, flashback arrestors, needle valves, flow meters, flame effects, bubble machines, circuit boards. But Burning Man requires improvisation and we kept our projects up and running all week.

We took The Hydrogen Economy to new heights.

PyroCardium’s heartbeats of fire pulsed far across the playa.

People liked to explode hydrogen bubbles.

And everyone wanted to know how PyroCardium works.

Toxic Bloom, lit up with four colors of fire triggered by that old memory game “Simon”.

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.