Edward L. Platt

For Maker Faire Detroit this year, I collaborated with Matt Oehrlein to build MindFlame, a mind-controlled flame effect game.

MindFlame uses commercial EEG headsets from NeuroSky to read the brain waves of two contestants. The signal is sent to an arduino, which can determine (more or less) how hard the contestants are focusing. When a contestant focuses hard enough, the arduino activates a solenoid, releasing a burst of propane past a glowfly ignitor, causing a giant burst of flame. The goal was to be the first person to get to four bursts of flame.

This project was tons of fun, and collaborating with Matt was great because we had twice as much time and resources to throw at the project, and I think the end result was much more impressive than we could have done individually. Plus, controlling fire with your mind is just awesome. Josh “Bacon” McAninch (from the Gon KiRin project) helped us with the flame effects, and Maddy "Brodi3" Winans helped us design and decorate the apparatus.

(Photo by Doyle S. Huge)

I wanted to do something interactive for Maker Faire last year. I had been drawing my PenFlakes, and thought it would be cool if people could design their own and print them out. So I created FlakePad, a javascript/HTML5 web app that enforces the basic symmetry of a snowflake, and provides a hexagonal grid to work off of.

Aside from being a great way to get my hands dirty with HTML5, the most interesting part of the app was creating the hexagonal grid. I wound up learning about and utilizing Isometric Cubic Coordinates. These coordinates provide an amazingly simple way to label hexagons on a grid, as well as a relatively simple transformation to and from standard Cartesian Coordinates. The basic trick is to recognize that a hexagonal grid, can be seen as a projection of a 3D arrangement of cubes centered on the plane x+y+z=0 (imagine Q*bert, the old NES game).