Melbourne regional burning man there was “Deep Space” and for the decompression party that was my costume. In the last couple of years I’ve been working in the medical field, mostly on LVADs – Left Ventricular Assist Device (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventricular_assist_device)
I was deeply influenced by it and wanted to make some kind of respiratory/heart-lungs machine as a costume, after some thought the Hummus Pistons project (Now SadoPunk 🙂 ) was burn.
The idea was simple, some king of Mad-Max mechanical electro-optical contraption that pump “something” that keeps you alive. This “Something” is being expressed by light energy movement and being pump into a choker/the neck.
At the base of the costume lay the pistons – an old hummus jar [Yeah, I was born in Israel :)] that fit perfectly into a PVC ‘Y connector’:
It was painted black sanded to give it a rustic/steampunk look and then coppered. The result was beautiful, it looks like the top part of a motor head.
Couple of months ago I’ve finished my monstrous 3D printer and it was put into a perfect usage in this project – I 3D printed a rotary to linear transmission and connected it to a sevro. I 3D printed the whole mechanism, cut the top of a servo head and glued it to the 3D printed part:
I assembled it and tested the movement using a RC (radio control) servo tester – it was good, but, I didn’t get all the movement that I was after. A standard servo can move at around 90deg and with trims/offset up to 120deg:
So I modified it by adding 5K resistor to the potentiometer:
And then integrated into the hummus pistons:
After I saw that the concept is working I printed out the pistons’ plane and integrated it as well:
The next obvious this was syncing it to my heartbeat. The sensor will be placed afterwards in the choker of the costume:
The next thing was to put LEDs inside it and diffuse the light:
The backpack was based on a 10L water tank that was cut in half:
A friend of mine helped me to sew it to a cheap BDSM harness that I bought form eBay and created a “cage” around it:
I then ran a reinforced transparent garden hose from the backpack to the choker. It looked sick!
The next thing after that was to start integrating the LEDs and the electronics, I used some styrofoam as a diffuser and ran the LED strips inside the hoses and to the choker. An Arduino was used to control the lights, servo motion and sample the heartbeat. I didn’t created an electronic scheme because its quite straight forward, but, as always you can download the code from my Github.
Putting everything together: The movement of the pistons is synchronised to the lights in the “combustion chamber”, the hoses and the choker, the sequence is piston compression -> combustion in the backpack -> lights running in the hose the the neck -> choker:
Bonus pix:
