Category: Burning Man

Posted on

Reduce Reuse & Recycle

Most battery packs that die tend to only have a single cell that is actually bad. A lot of the times the issue is the IC and not all the cells are sill useable. So I went to a good will and asked offered a crazy low price for a whole box of batteries. They agreed and I got to cracking them open.

After separating the 18650 cells, they each go through three tests independently. The tests determines the cells internal resistance, how much capacity it hold, and if there are any internal shorts.

3D printed parallel chargers
That’s a whole lot of cells

Each cell is labeled with the date, the capacity rating, and it’s current charge. To be extra safe I let them sit for a month and discarded any that dropped more than 0.1 volt.

I used https://www.repackr.com/ to make sure each of the sets of ten 18650s in parallel are balanced in capacity.

Posted on

Robot Disco – It Begins!

It all started with a Craigslist ad for an electric wheelchair base with dead batteries. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it but after seeing the cupcake art cars at burning man in 2019 I knew I needed to build something similar.

The machine is manufactured by Pihsiang Machinery MFG Co LTD. The posting came with all the electrics for the scoother by a company called Dynamic Controls. I tried interfacing with the Shark Controller with little luck and decided to simplify and replace all the electronics with standard robotics devices. But first we need to test out the OEM systems.

Posted on

Teacher Money – BRC 2019

Bryan and Steph’s First Burn! 2019 was our camp’s inaugural year. We decided to go full send and start a theme camp. A fellow burner and VR developer created a VR experience called Cosmic Sugar. We loved sharing it with our friends and knew we wanted to bring it to playa as our camp’s main interactivity. Once we got placed, we knew we could not do it alone, so we reached out for help on Reddit. That is where we met the other founding members.

from left to right: Albert, Cindy, Nanako, Blake, Bryan, Stephanie, Jamie

At the time, Cindy and Jamie were virgins like us, Albert and Nanako had burned twice, and Blake had an impressive nine burns under his belt. We ran the interactivity each night for around 150 burners. People seemed to really enjoy it, and we even had people tell us it was the best gift they received.

Our Name

Our name is really just an oxymoron that is meant to make people think about the state of public education and how much we compensate the people that are molding our future generations.

Our Leads

Camp Leads
Nanako & Blake (Los Angeles) Bryan & Stephanie (Austin)

Our Mission

To create an environment that empowers everyone to realize their full potential as the artist of their own life, learning to shape themselves into a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

Our Motto

Fail better next year.