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.