My tornado machine build!

[Things]

I have been mucking around with tornado machines for a few years now, as they are quite fun to watch

I am just starting to finish off one of the largest ones I have built, at about 2 metres tall

I am going to cover the 2 side walls in acrylic, since the blowers I am using on the pipes don't create enough pressure to stand up to minor air currents. It will also be painted black, and LED lighting added.

But what I have been thinking of doing, is making it entirely computer controllable using a microcontroller. You would have speed control on the rotation, on/off control of the updraft fan, control of the fog, as well as the light colour + brightness. What I was also thinking of doing is adding pressure sensors inside and outside of the machine, and having it display this data on the computer, or a nice little 16x2 LCD on the machine itself

Here it is so far:







Got more work to do on it tomorrow, I'll post some more pics then, and hopefully some better ones of the vortex itself

-Dan

[Doc]

Very nice! I have thought about having a go at one of those myself but never gotten round to it.

Good work.

Now add a VDG for some lightning

[Things]

Very nice! I have thought about having a go at one of those myself but never gotten round to it.

Good work.

Now add a VDG for some lightning

Just for added effect later on, maybe I will add a nice bright LED, and have it flash randomly every so often, just to make things more interesting.

Just tidied up the wiring a bit:

[White-Light]

I wonder if you could feed it with a hazer rather than using a piezo electric vapour generator.

Also, wonder if you could scale it up using leaf blower motors instead of small electric fan style.

Make a great club install then. Imagine building a supersize 10 foot high x 4 or 5 foot square version with a huge vortex comprising the haze machine. What an eye catching way to output the haze that would be!

[White-Light]

This is also pretty cool with fire although I could see some fire marshals taking offence!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8kQb...eature=related

[Doc]

That was cool (no pun intended) with the fire.

What about a recirculating system with dust (maybe lightweight ash) and glitter particles and a strobe?

[shrad]

you may try to find a philips ambilight lamp, they can be modded to output colors via SPI interface, really easy to interface to a microcontroller (just a small mod to do to the lamp PCB)

vortex machines like those are really eyecatching!

if the fume amount is modulable, you could strobe it like those strobed effects on falling water drops, no?

[Things]

Almost finished it

All I need now, is to wait for some RGB star LED's from DX, then I can add some cool lighting

For the pics, my dad was shining a torch down thru the fan.

For scale (No, that's not me ):







Sorry for those people with slow internet or tiny monitors, but you loose detail if I make them any smaller.

I am extremely impressed with how well it works now

[Doc]

Congratulations, that's very nice

[shrad]

awesome!

now you have true eyecandy for your guests