Tag Archives: Allen Pan
Punch-activated Flamethrowers are the Best Kind of Flamethrowers
Who doesn’t like flamethrowers? Everybody but space bugs and fire extinguishers, that’s who. Now, Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced just went and made the best flamethrowers ever. You see, these wrist-mounted fire shooters activate their wearer throws a punch. Awesomesauce!
Allen created these punch-activated flamethrowers as a tribute to the firebending in Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. Their core design is basically a butane fuel chamber and a solenoid valve, combined with a modified arc-based lighter to spark it to life. An Arduino Pro Mini controller and an accelerometer detect the punch movement, and trigger the spark and the valve when it’s time to fire up.
But enough tech talk. I know you want to see them in action, so here goes:
If you dare play with fire yourself (and I’m not advocating this), drop by Allen’s page over on Hackster.IO, where he’s putting together a complete DIY build log for these amazing wrist weapons.
Real-Life Mjolnir Can Only Be Picked Up by the Geek Who Built It
Remember that hilarious after-party scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron where all the superheroes tried unsuccessfully to lift Thor’s hammer from the table? A geek picked up that idea and created a real-life replica of the hammer than only
“Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor,” is written on the side of Mjolnir, as mentioned both in the Marvel comics and movies. Joss Whedon thought it would be cool to include in the latest Avengers movie a scene with Tony Stark and Steven Rogers attempting to take control over Asgard by trying to lift Thor’s hammer. Seeing as how they are not capable of doing that, despite their superhuman strength, Stark jokily states that whosoever has Thor’s fingerprints can lift Mjolnir. That’s the precise phrase that determined an engineer called Allen Pan to build a real-life replica of the hammer that can only be handled by him. Crazy, right?
So the hammer identifies the owner by his fingerprints, but what happens next? Before revealing that, let’s focus a bit on that biometric authentication part. The handle includes a touch sensor that’s connected to an Arduino Pro Mini and a solid state relay. On top of that, there is a fingerprint scanner embedded into the handle. After the people authorized to handle the hammer get authenticated, magic starts happening.
As you can see in the above video, the hammer is placed at all times on metallic surfaces, so if your bulb lit up and you exclaimed “Yeah, b***h! Magnets!” (you get bonus points if you did that in Jesse Pinkman’s voice), you are spot on. More precisely, the hammer’s head features microwave oven transformer electromagnets, which despite being not as powerful as the ones from Breaking Bad, they can still keep Mjolnir attached to the metallic surface it was placed on. Besides keeping it in place, the electromagnet also makes the hammer seem heavier, and thus, closer to what Mjolnir is in the comics.
After the fingerprint sensor deems Pan as “the worthy,” the electromagnets are turned off and Mjolnir can finally be picked up. That’s the part that makes the video Pan shot on Venice beach even more hilarious.
All in all, since Avengers cosplay has been done to death, it’s great to see someone do things differently. In fact, Pan’s hammer could go hand in hand with the Iron Man glove that lets you shoot lasers. Given Pan’s attraction for comic books, I guess he could showcase his creation at some ComicCon, and since he is so creative, I’m sure he could come up with more real-life replicas of gadgets from the Marvel movies. Heck, in his case, I don’t mind if he turns his attention to DC Comics material!
This also makes one wonder how many times has technology been used in the past two millennia to simulate magic…
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[via Tech Times]