my flying saucer

The Original Inspiration (Mutant Vehicles at Burning Man)

At Burning Man, you see all kinds of crazy vehicles. CRAZY! Like, completely batshit crazy. My first year, about six campsites over there was a guy with a gigantic old-fashioned locomotive engine. It was built out of a big UPS truck or something, and the truck's windshield was behind the cowcatcher. The thing was just enormous, with gigantic (fake) wooden wheels which were animated with EL wire to sorta make it look like the wheels were turning. Up on top, where the engineer would ordinarly be, there was a big dance floor, complete with lights, DJ booth, the whole bit.

And people drive these things across the surface of the playa, at 5 mph, which if anything only helps to exaggerate their size. And you see all kinds of elaborate stuff. Here are some random photos, some of which I took and some of which I grabbed off the web:

It's a woefully small sampling, but hopefully it at least gives some sense to the crazy stuff people build for Burning Man. Also, many of the vehicles are brilliantly lit and spectacular at night, and I don't think these photos are particularly representive of that side of things either.

My Flying Saucer

Anyway, I was pretty inspired by all these ridiculous vehicles, so I immediately started plotting to build one of my own. I had several ideas, but eventually I decided that it was going to be a flying saucer. I'm not sure how I arrived at this decision, and I'm still not 100% sure how I'm going to build it, but I have the basic idea pretty fleshed out. It's primarily meant to be a night-time vehicle, and the idea was to have the saucer section lined with a bunch of strips of EL Wire, and animate the EL wire to create the illusion of spin.

As for a base vehicle, after some poking around I decided that a Taylor-Dunn utility cart might work out pretty well. These are super heavy-duty industrial carts, the kind of thing you might see a school janitor driving around in. And they're pretty buff - heavy leaf springs, 9" Ford differential, a diamond-plate body that could could just weld stuff onto if you wanted. Some of them have a 5000 lb towing capacity. Serious business, these carts, yet reasonably small. So the idea was to take one of these carts and figure out how to put a saucer around it. Here's a sketch of the basic idea:

The "spokes" that radiate outward would be lined with strips of EL Wire, with each of these strips on an independent EL Wire sequencer channel, so that a chase sequencer would create the illusion of spin. Well, I though it would be a cool idea, but guess what? Nobody makes an EL Wire sequencer with nearly enough channels to create the effect I had in mind. It would be nice if there was a way to create the illusion of spin, but wouldn't be even cooler to have two or three or however many strips illuminated at any given time, all chasing each other around, speeding up, slowing down, stopping, backing up, and so on, You know, like a proper flying saucer ought to do.

When I first started contemplating this project, that was the big unknown - nobody builds such a thing so if I wanted one I was gonna have to build it myself. Could I build such a thing? Since it was the area of greatest uncertaintly, and since there didn't seem to be much point in making a flying saucer that didn't spin (you know, like a proper flying saucer ought to), I started working on the lighting controller first. I'm an embdedded software engineer by trade, but I'd never actually done any circuit design. So this became my very first ground-up hardware design project. But in a couple months, I got a 16-channel prototype working and I wrote about that experience here. I learned an awful lot along the way, but due to some unforseen schedule conflicts, I had to shelve the project for the 2007 burn. I did make it it out to to the playa for the first five days, and while I was out there and after I returned, I had two new concerns.

I was worried about mutant vehicle restrictions. The days of just showing up at Burning Man with a crazy vehicle are long gone. Now you have to send in an application in April or May, and if it's approved, you can then bring it to the playa. And then you have to have it inspected by the Department of Mutant Vehicles. There are actually two separate license that are issued - one for day use and one for night use. These regulations apply to any vehicle that has a motor and a seat. There are other restrictions as well.
It may not be bright enough. I noticed that a lot of people are going to LED rope light, which is a lot brighter than EL Wire. It creates a different effect, but it is a lot brighter. And I heard a few stories about DMV giving people grief that their vehicle was not radically illuminated enough. Again, I didn't want to go to all this trouble just to be denied a night-timer permit by DMV.

I don't know how grounded in reality these worries are, but it would really suck to spend hundreds of hours working on a vehicle, only to show up and not be able to use it at Burning Man. So for my first go-round, I decided to build a human-powered vehicle. With a human-powered vehicle, you don't need no steenkeeng badges. I can just bring it and use it. There are other advantages too, from the philosophical standpoint of being human-powered, to the practical advantages of not having to deal with gasoline, generators, the increased likelihood of mechanical breakdown, increased weight, and so on. I did decide, though, that it would be nice to switch from EL Wire to LED rope light, and I'm in the midst of designing that controller as of this writing (April 2008).

I also bought my "base vehicle," which is a four-passenger surrey I bought off Craigslist. It's an Italian-made quadricycle called a Ciclofan Delfino. Here's a photo:

There are four sets of pedals, although theoretically it seats six people (that remains to be seen). It's pretty heavy - about 300 pounds, so you really do need a few people to help pedal it around. It's a good thing the playa is flat. Anyway, imagine this thing with a lit-up saucer around it, and that's basically what I'm trying to build.

The quadricycle / surrey arrived in pretty good condition, although one of the front suspension pieces was bent from being crashed into a tree or something. I didn't notice it at the time I bought it - only later when I tried to ajust the toe-in and couldn't. Fortunately, the US distributor is in Ventura and they've been very helpful hooking me up with the pieces that I need to get it going. So now the new suspension piece is in place, the front wheels now point the same direction, and the brakes work too. So the surrey is in a pretty happy state right now.

On the lighting front, I've been playing around with designs for a new 64 (or possibly 80, I still can't decide) channel LED rope light controller. Unlike the prototype, this one is going to use an 8-bit PIC microcontroller, it's going to be very small, and I recently figured out a clever trick that will enable the exact same circuit board layout to work for either EL wire or LED rope light. Not both at once, but at the moment I am assuming that I'm marching forward with LED rope light. My LED rope light samples are still backordered, and if for some reason I'm forced to backpedal, I can substitute out some of the components on the PC board and convert it over to control EL wire instead. This is actually a big relief. It'd be a drag to spend all that money on laying out PC board for LED rope light, and then later be forced to do it all over again for EL wire. I'll publish schematics on my EL Wire page when the circuit is working.

The other thing I gotta do is figure out how to build a saucer. Never done that before! Awhile back, I was looking at my bicycle basket and realized that it's pretty light and pretty strong. I mean, I can carry 60 pounds of ice in that thing. If I can figure out what kind of wire to buy, I might be able to build a saucer section out of the same type of wire that these bike baskets are made out of. This assumes, of course, that I can find the right kind of wire, and that I can figure out how to work with the stuff. Anyway, that's my plan for now. Build a frame (somehow) and then find some shiny silvery cloth to stretch over it. How hard can it be? (Famous last words).