Here’s another post of an old project. This project was our team’s entry for the 2013 Red Bull creation contest. The Blastomatic is a electronically controlled super soaker which spells out the word Red Bull in electro-luminescent water.

Our original plan was to make the super soaker write out words in gasoline and then shoot bottle rockets at the wall and light the words on fire. We quickly realized pressurizing gasoline and fire dont mix to well. So we decided to use water that we dissolved a bunch of yellow highlighters into and used black lights to make make the water glow.

Build Process

We procrastinated WAY to much on this project so the entire project was done in 2 weekends. The second and final weekend we worked on this project was the weekend of my sisters wedding, so I did all of the debugging via ssh connection on my cellphone. That was definitely not my favorite way to code/debug.

Results

We finally got everything “working” late Sunday night and while the control code was definitely not what I would have liked in terms of polish (long pauses on direction change, and flow control). If you know in advance what the Blastomatic is spelling out and watch the video you can actually see it what it says, but watching without knowing anything I think it would just look like random streams of water. I would have loved to have more time to get everything working better but that doesn’t always work out. Still tarping off our living room and blasting highlighter water everywhere was pretty awesome. In the end we had a lot of fun, ate way to much taco bell, and had a mostly working project in the end.