Project UberTutu

This project came about partly due to a slight obsession with things which emit many photons.
I had a string of digitally addressable LEDs from Adafruit bought because well... They were shiny! Enter Circillumina: An invite only rave dance party kind of thing... The perfect opportunity to play with glowwy lights.

Jez spinning his rather epic LED creation, the Mitochondrion

While throwing ideas around with Jillian and Rachel we decided that construction of some slightly out there costumes would be in order. Jillian is a stilt performer as one of her many many talents, she agreed to put on a bit of a stilt show at Circillumina 2 so a costume had to be created.
Rachel had a tutu in her collection of dress ups and I had the lights... Time to do something cool.

Rachel and Jillian started off by sewing the string of LEDs into the tutu whilst I ignored my nagging thoughts about how on earth this thing was going to be powered... The LEDs draw around 5W, not a small amount of power for something that has to run on batteries for several hours.

The LEDs are controlled by an Arduino which I soldered a JST connector directly to.

First test of UberTutu modeled by Rachel, Running Adafruit code.

As things were starting to come together, I turned attention back to power. I considered a number of different battery chemistries:

I have access to some pretty huge LiPo electric flight batteries, however I decided against this... The thought of strapping a battery which without warning can turn into an incendiary device to my friend did not appeal.

I have a Pag C6 video light: This has a 6V 8Ah NiCad battery pack with internal fusing. It's big, heavy, ugly and in a form factor that's not very sympathetic to being fitted to the female form. It is however safe. I used two silicon diodes in series with the battery to reduce the voltage a bit as the LEDs are designed to run from 5V.

I set about making a belt to house the battery that was comfortable and not too obtrusive.  I purchased a couple of metres of a while parka nylon from Global Fabrics in Wellington much to the amusement of the staff there.
After ten minutes with a pencil and paper I came up with a pattern. I cut the fabric out with a soldering iron in order to avoid the need to hem or fray stop the edges.

Unfortunately there aren't any more photos of the battery belt being made up as time was running short.

Jillian showing off the battery belt

Some flashier code was written and everything came together just in time for the night...

Featured on Adafruit Wearable Wednesday

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Some friends of mine and I decided to have a bit of a farm get away weekend recently. One of the things we decided would be fun while away was break the sound barrier... With a really big cannon.

Some of you may be familiar with the pNuke system of air toys which have featured in videos such as Sleepeater... The cannon used here is a more powerful and scary version with a custom built valve and some other trickery.

Modified deluge valve fitted to the air tank.

Fire deluge valve with a 5/2 3/8th inch pilot valve.

The barrel is a 6m length of 40mm scaffolding pipe coupled to the pNuke via some very big rubber hose and Mikalor super heavy duty hose clamps.

Clamps securing the rubber hose to the steel pipe. 

Rubber hose coupled to the deluge valve.

Unfortunately we were unable to achieve supersonic projectiles, I think this is due to the maximum flow through the valve not being high enough or the interior of the barrel is too rough.


Despite this the result is pretty spectacular...

As usual, Glow Sticks are pretty impressive in the dark:

We made a projectile out of rolled up newspaper and gaffer tape... It promptly disintegrated when launched.

An attempt to fire a lemon resulted in a lemonade mist... No pieces of the lemon were found.

SHIHAD - Sleepeater

When Sam Peacocke approached me about doing some effects for a Shihad music video I had no idea how apt the title was going to turn out :-D

I was given a ten page PDF of how the video was to play out... It required a spinning shaking chair, water cannons, smoke machines and a wind cannon. For me it simply read: Lets make some cool stuff :-)

The pNuke:

This cannon resulted from my initial "more power Igor!" approach to the water cannon idea. The pNuke is a 9kg gas tank fitted with a 2" solenoid sprinkler valve. The tank is pressurised  with an air compressor, activating the valve dumps the tank with quite some violence.

Thanks to: Greg at work for helping me out with the welding and James at Deeco for the valve.

Testing the pNuke with no nozzle:

The water is thrown even further when you fit the pNuke with a nozzle:

The following video shows why we decided to only use the pNuke as a wind machine... It's simply too violent when shooting water:

My Dad being pNuked:

Smoke Ring Cannon:
We did initially want to shoot smoke at everyone in the video... Software glitches filling our tent with smoke made us decide at about 1am on the saturday morning that smoke was a bad idea.



The Gentle Annie Water Guns:
These were used for generating the streams of water than fly behind and into each person as they spin on the chair.

A bank of 3/4" solenoid valves fill a bunch of polypipes with water and then use compressed air to "empty" them in a hurry.


Valve Bank:

The Gentle Annies required two different air supplies in order to achieve the desired effets. The pNuke was also supplied with regulated and filtered compressed air.

Air Supply Manifold:

The Final Result: www.sleepeater.co.nz/

Check back soon :) This is a work in progress...

Walk Through Fire

I was approached through a friend of mine about doing some special effects for an upcoming music video. My first thought was count me in!

Final product is here Making of shots etc are to follow as they're sorted through.