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”.

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.

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.

Ethan managed to turn fire a bright red color using strontium chloride salt dissolved in water. He dispensed the salt with an airbrush nozzle powered by a small air compressor and we tried on several flames including a large propane venturi flamethrower as shown in this video.

Hi-Def Version

Watch the video.

Reporter: “So then what application do you have, besides the entertainment factor?”

Brett: “Wait, what?”

Brendan: “OTHER than the entertainment factor? What are you talking about?”

Brett: “Don’t get me started on the transition between the sense of human curiosity–”


Reporter: “No no, that’s excellent–”

Brett: “To explore the physical properties of nature–”

Reporter: “Right, but don’t you have something like, it’ll replace rocket ships to go to the moon?”


Brendan: “No it’s more like, even on the moon people will need something fun to do… and slightly dangerous. It’s more along those lines.”

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

Chris wrote previously about building nichrome wire ignitors. Now he’s got it perfected, and built a cloud of 20. What better to do than put the new bubble machine underneath?

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.