Smoke Ring Blaster

Mwahahahahaha! Behold my latest invention! The mad-scientist-must-have of the season - the Smoke Ring Blaster!

Create vortices of air made visible with smoke and light, then blast people in the face with it!

A fantastic addition to any trick or treating expedition, just make sure to ask your neighbours permission before blasting them.

1. An Airzooka (like this one)
2. An Arduino Nano (or similar)
3. An Accelerometer (I used this one)
4. 6 LEDs (10mm diameter)
5. 6 resistors (100ohm)
6. A mini smoke machine (I used this one)
7. A power bank
8. A 3D printed LED mount (but you could use cardboard too!)
9. A 3D printed holder for the smoke machine and power bank (or tape!)

I created custom 3D printed parts for this build but you can definitely get away with taping things onto your Airzooka and using cardboard for the front if you don't have access to a printer. Here are the files for those that do.

The LED mount is made from 3 pieces which slot together to cover up the wiring for the LEDs.

Both printed parts are hot glued onto the Airzooka at the end.

Solder together the 6 LEDs in parallel with a resistor on each one.

I wired it up so that the shared power line ran around the inside of the circle and the ground ran around the outside, then two wires coming off these can be left long to connect to our arduino.

Hot glue everything in place.

The accelerometer will detect motion and the action of blasting the Airzooka creates a jolt which can be picked up by looking at the change in acceleration.

The code is attached to this step, but in short it takes a reading when it is first booted up then continually checks if the current acceleration is very different form this initial reading. Feel free to fiddle around with the numbers to tune the sensitivity if it's not detecting a change.

I have my LEDs plugged into digital pin 3 and the accelerometer plugged into analogue pins 0, 1 and 2.

I have left some commented out debugging code to check the acceleration in the file in case it's useful to anyone.

Hot glue the face plate and the smoke machine mount to the Airzooka.

I drilled a small hole in the bottom and fed a tube from the smoke machine into the body of the airzooka to make it as hands free as possible.

Plug it all in and try it out!

Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of a great science demo showing vortices of air and a very funny Halloween prop.

Enjoy!