Modd3d

I think I’ve turned into a flashlight snob.  When I was a kid, those disposable flashlights with the batteries you couldn’t change were just fine.  When I started doing theatre in high school I discovered the Mini Maglite and I thought I’d died and gone to flashlight heaven.  They were bright (compared to the disposables) and you didn’t have to hit them to get them to stay on.

Years later a friend introduced me to Surefire flashlights.  They put my old Mini Maglite to shame.  They’re bright (for real this time), they’re tough, and they do neat tricks like shine in multiple colors and brightnesses.  I own several of them, and I’ve been carrying their Backup model around in my pocket for a couple years now.

A few months ago I stupidly lost my Backup.  I don’t want to go into detail on how I lost it, but it has to do with how my brain doesn’t really work in the middle of the night when I get up to go check something out with my flashlight.  I miss that light.

Recently I bought a Surefire P2X Fury as a replacement for my old light.  It was more than twice as bright on its maximum setting and a little cheaper even, so I figured I should get one.

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Hand flashers are fun effects- they let you shoot a ball of fire right out of your hand. They’re great for plays, haunted houses, magic tricks, practical jokes and showing off in front of cute girls/guys. Who doesn’t love fire? The effect uses flash cotton and flash paper which burn so fast that it is fairly safe.

I just found an Instructable that tells you how you can make your own hand flasher / fireball shooter. During the recent production of Cats I did tech for (the one that gave birth to the confetti cannon) I ended up buying a hand flasher because I didn’t have time to engineer one myself and it cost me over 50 bucks. I wish this Instructable was around a couple months ago.

Anyway, most of the stuff needed to build the thing is available at Home Depot (your in-store engineering headquarters!). I was sort of hoping that the author had come up with a nifty way of making a glo-plug (used to ignite the flash-cotton) out of parts from the Depot too but that you have to order online. You also need to get the flash cotton and flash paper from somewhere, but your town probably has a magic shop if you don’t feel like ordering it online.

The author built his own Movie Mood Light that mimics the Philips Ambilight system. It detects the average color of the top, left and right edges of a video image and uses PWM to match the colors with a set of cold cathodes (or LEDs if you prefer). This tutorial walks you through the hardware construction and provides the direct show filter and the hex code for the PIC.