I Built A Smoke Machine

Ok, so it certainly wasn't on my list of projects to do, but I needed a way to make lasers look even cooler, and smoke was the answer. But instead of buying one, I did what any good engineer should do and built my own; the perfect and FREE solution to my problem.

Now its nothing special on its own, it doesn't produce a jet of smoke its more passive. It slowly fills a room with a haze which makes it easy to clearly see the whole beam of a laser when its shone across the length of the lab.

Now to address the elephant in the room. The lasers I'm talking about are a part of a project I started at the end of 2016 but, as usual, never got round to finishing. (There's definitely a pattern going on here isn't there?)

I'm not going into details as to what is is, that's the subject of my next post. But it is essentially a way to visualize music by tying each of the standard 88 MIDI notes to a laser and playing a song through it for an awesome light show!

The smoke machine works by heating up a heating element (Nichrome wire, if you look far back enough in this blog there is a very old video of me messing about with some) to essentially evaporate the same liquid they use in electronic cigarettes, vegetable glycerin. This is then sucked out and diffused through the room using a fan and pipe system. The construction pictures below describe it better then text can.

The vegetable glycerin isn't suppose to look black and gooey I assure you! The system got too hot and some of the hose melted down into it and made the chamber look horrid. Its perfectly safe to breath in don't worry.

And here is my large tub of pharmaceutical grade vegetable glycerin which should last me a lifetime.

Again, the youtube video explains all the details and shows what the lab looks like full of smoke,so go watch that here. The purpose of the blog is really for behind the scenes and construction pictures, not technical explanations.