The art of firebending as seen in Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra is a melding of Asian martial arts and pyrokinesis. So how can we control fire with fancy fight moves in real life? With Arduinos, of course!
The flamethrower part of this project is composed of a butane fuel chamber and a solenoid valve. At the business end there is a modified arc lighter.
The punch activated part of this project is an Arduino Pro Mini and an accelerometer (in this case an LIS3DH Breakout from Adafruit). A fist performing a punch has a fairly unique acceleration profile that looks like a significant positive acceleration (the beginning of the punch), followed by an extreme deceleration (the end of the punch) within a small window of time (<100ms). That means our Arduino can distinguish punches from normal everyday gesticulations pretty easily!
Once everything is mounted to an arm, we have a flamethrower that can be actuated by an Arduino only when the arm has thrown a punch. And before you can say "sparky sparky boom man" you've become a firebender!
This isn't a beginner project, and even for advanced users there is danger inherent in shooting fireballs from your fists. Read at your own risk!
Adafruit LIS3DH Triple-Axis Accelerometer (+-2g/4g/8g/16g): The LIS3DH is a very popular low power triple-axis accelerometer. It’s low-cost, but has just about every ‘extra’ you’d want in an accelerometer:
Three axis sensing, 10-bit precision
±2g/±4g/±8g/±16g selectable scaling
Both I2C (2 possible addresses) and SPI interface options
Interrupt output
Multiple data rate options 1 Hz to 5Khz
As low as 2uA current draw (just the chip itself, not including any supporting circuitry)
Tap, Double-tap, orientation & freefall detection
3 additional ADC inputs you can read over I2C
To all that, we’ve also added:
3.3V regulator + level shifting, so you can safely use with any Arduino or microcontroller without the need for an external level shifter! Read more.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!