Adding smoke to your projects : Mist machine
Unlike what consultants sell, sometimes my projects need some smoke. Us engineers are raised to fear smoke, but in model making adding smoke to things makes them shine more than any LED could.
Over years, I have been adding smoke to the models I have built. In this blog I talk about the easiest way to do so - Good old misting machine.
These have two parts : The disc that vibrates at a frequency high enough to provide enough energy to water molecules so that escape the surface tension of their fellow molecules. The other is the driver circuit that drives this perforated piezo disc. You can easily find them on Amazon or Aliexpress.
The quality is questionable. Please never order one of these. They almost always break when playing with them.
You can attach it to any vessel you like and create custom shapes/enclosures. The cotton tube is used to wick the water as it mists away from the end of the tube.
...Or create your own 3D printed cases.
How to control them?
The driving module has pads exposed inviting us to hack them. Lets understand the state machine inside the micro-controller on-board. It has one button. If we press it, it moves between two states. On and Interval On. If we want to Go from On -> Off, we can press that button once to turn ON and twice to turn OFF. On button press, the IO is grounded.
The toggle times that work for me look like this :
void toggleSmoke()
{
digitalWrite(SMOKE,LOW);
delay(50);
digitalWrite(SMOKE,HIGH);
}
The buttons hacked and wired as shown inside a magical prop I built for a magician-chef.
Here is the video in action (He was not convinced with the smoke)
If you are looking for something much more reliable, some folks I met at this year's OSHW Summit built a nice dedicated board for it using Seeedstudio's XIAO modules. I am still looking for ways to buy it? Wanna do a crowd-buy?
The magician was not happy with this amount of smoke... so i took some drastic steps next..
More soon.
Cheers, Rohit