Collaborate Disseminate
[MJKZZ] sends in this entertaining little tutorial on building a small automated cannon out of a syringe.
He starts the build off by modifying an arc lighter, the fancy kind one might use to light a fire on a windy day, so that it can be controlled by a micro-controller. …read more
Continue reading Death to all Coca Cola Cans with This Miniature Arduino Powered Cannon
Always wanted to be a citizen of Fire Nation? Here’s one way to ace the citizenship exam: punch-activated flaming kung fu gauntlets of doom.
As with all the many, many, many flamethrower projects we’ve featured before, we’ve got to say this is just as bad an idea as they are and that you should not build any of them. That said, [Sufficiently Advanced]’s wrist-mounted, dual-wielding flamethrowers are pretty cool. Fueled by butane and containing enough of the right parts for even a minimally talented prosecutor to make federal bomb-making charges stick, the gauntlets each have an Arduino and accelerometer to …read more
Continue reading Be the Firebender You Want to See in the World
[JLaservideo] has created some cool high-voltage gloves and uploaded a video on YouTube showing you how to et your mitts on a pair of your own. Using some very simple parts, he manages to make some decent sparks.
At the heart of this project is one of those new-fangled arc lighters which normally use some type of voltage multiplier circuit to function. The rest of the build is just wire, glue, aluminum foil, a switch, and paintball gloves.
Using the tip of each finger as an electrode, anything he touches will complete the circuit, creating high-voltage arcs. The demo of …read more
We’ve all been guilty of buying things we want, but don’t need. And that’s how [PodeCoet] found himself in possession of a couple of double-arc electric lighters, thanks to those far-eastern websites purveying cheap goods. ‘Tis the season of giving after all, justified [PodeCoet]. Being a hacker, the obvious thing to do was to make them belt out tinny tunes. If you’re still holding on to your gas lighters, don’t — because these electric ones are ‘oh so hackable’. Dual-arcs are the same, but twice the fun.
[PodeCoet] starts off with a tear down of the lighter, to figure out …read more
[GreatScott!] needs to light off fireworks with an arc rather than a flame, because “fireworks and plasma” is cooler than fireworks and no plasma. To that end, he attempted to reverse engineer an arc lighter, but an epoxy potted high-voltage assembly thwarted him. Refusing to accept defeat, he modified a CCFL inverter into an arc lighter, and the process is pretty educational.
With his usual impeccable handwriting and schematic drawing skills, [GreatScott!] documents that his CCFL inverter is a resonant Royer oscillator producing a sine wave of about 37 kHz, which is then boosted to about 2400 volts. That’s pretty …read more
Continue reading Hacked CCFL Inverter becomes an Arc Lighter
What do you get when you combine an arc cigarette lighter and some scrap glass and metal? [NightHawkInLight] created a simple plasma cutter project along with some hot glue and a few simple tools.
If you aren’t a smoker, an arc lighter uses a high voltage spark to light the cigarette. He essentially cannibalizes it for use as a power supply. Any similar high-voltage power supply should work just as well. He also uses the same cigarette lighter power supply for an arc pen, that we covered earlier.
The cutter uses a small steel screw and a bit of glass …read more
Wood burning can be quite a striking art form, but who wants to be stuck using an old-fashioned resistive heating element to char wood? You could go with laser engraving, of course, but that seems to take too much of the human touch out of it. So why not try a mini plasma pen and blow torch powered by a fancy cigarette lighter?
Arc lighters are rechargeable electronic lighters that look like a tiny stun-gun, and [NightHawkInLight] has been coming up with some interesting hacks for them. In this case, he extended the electrode leads out and mounted them to …read more
