Smoking Blaster & Smoking Robots

[robothut]

I had made a post asking if anyone here had messed around with the new E-Cigs but I guess no one had as the post recived no replys and has since disappeared. So I bought one on line cheep and took it apart. Here is a block diagram of whats in them and how they work. You will never find a smaller special effects fogger / smoker and the important parts like the Atomizor (heater) and smoke juice can be bought for a few bucks, you may not need the compleat unit for your special project.

You can take the compleat E-Cig apart. The part that looks like the filter is a plastic cap that has a small hole at the mouth end and a large opening at the other. Inside this plastic cap is a second plastic bucket, the closed end of the bucket goes in to the plastic filter cap first. Inside the bucket is the Wool fiber you normaly see in a smoker unit, it has be saturated with the smoke juice. When new there is a foil lid on this bucket, once the filter cap part has been pushed on to the Atomizor (heater) the foil is periced so the smoke juice can get to the heater. Once the smoke juice is used up (this takes a very long long time) you can replace it with other water based fog juice like the ZERO smoker toys use or just replace with another E-Cig fillter tip. The heater unit can be unscrewed from the battery part of the unit, you can solder to the center contact and outer metal shell of the heater to make it work. 3 volts is plenty. Acualy you should set up your design to supply power to the smoker for ony 2 or 3 seconds at a time other wise you will make way to much smoke and use up the smoke juice very fast. Now if you do buy a compleat E-Cig anf not just a replacement heater and filter tip smoke juice then you can take the threaded connector off the battery barrel and use it in your design, this way you will be able to replace the heater by just unscrewing the heater if need be and the connector already has wires solder to it. The battery can be pushed out of the barrel and on the TIP front of the unit you will find a plastic cover, this is for a LED to shine on to imatate a glowing tip, take this plastic cap off to get the battery and electronics out. There is a small circuit board, control chip, LED and a vacuum sensor. It very cool what they done here. When used a a Cig and you suck on the filter part, the vacuum sensor sends a signal to the control chip, the control chip then turns on the heater and the LED. If you design has a fan or bellows that sucks in the filter end then you could use all this cool electronics as is but if your like me you will gut the unit for the Filter smoke juice bucket and heater and the screw connector. I found that a small battery fan like you would find in a bubble blowing toy then placed on the filter end or the heater connector end will push out mountans of smoke like fog. Also a small sqeeker from a dog toy that had seen better days was placed on the filter end and produced lots of smoke from a unit that is less than 1/2 the size of your little finger!

[robothut]

Here is a picture of the sqeaker toy bellows and the fan set up tryed a few different ways.

[robothut]

Refilling the filter tip with Zero Fog juice. Acualy I never was able to use up all the Cig juice so I just pulled out the satureated wool Cotton and put in some of my own from that chewed up dog toy I talked about before.

[dratomic]

Very cool, John. Looking forward to seeing what people come up with!

[Electric Robot and Son]

John,

Nice work. Could be a new segment on How do they do that? I'll have to keep that in mind for an upcoming robot or space toy.

[robothut]

Yes I hope to see some nice projects from you guys this Whinter, maybe with micro smokers in them. Just to add a bit more I got my unit from www.E-healthcigarettes.com . Thye have the heaters for under $4 bucks and the smoke cartriges are around 75 cents each when you buy a box. I bought a compleat kit for under $20 bucks that gave me lots of smoke cartriges, the compleat cig unit and a charger for the built in battery. There are lots of sellers on line for these devices. Many sites sell the heaters "atomizors" for around $10 bucks and smoke juice in bottles so you can fill your own.

Oh and a person could use the unit as sold with a manual control of the heater by just popping off the plastic cap that the LED lights up, then you can see two long solder posts on the circuit board, they go to the preshure sensor, "the sensor is alot like a mini MIC like you would find in a digital camera or MP3 player that records audio" by touching one of the posts you can turn ON the heater, so a person could put a touch switch on a trigger of a BLASTER for example so when you pull the trigger the heater is turned on, if the trigger also move a bellows or turns on a blower then you are all set.

[Eagle]

Very informative. In regards to using it in a gun. To make a rapid discharge, would it be possible to use a sonic wave to drive the smoke. By using the movement of a a speaker cone? I know on my old JBL 100's you can feel the air moving out of the speaker box. A wave generator. :huh:

[Tinman]

Jeez, for a minute there I thought you were constructing a lightsaber! Nice mechanism John!

[Tinplate6]

So, are smoking Alphadrome ray guns in our future now? ;)

[robothut]

I hope smoking Alphadrome ray guns are in our future , but its all up to you guys . I just bring in ideas so you can play. Now that you have seen the mini smokers work with Bellows and blowers here is a air pump meant for fish tanks when the power goes out. It runs on 1.5 volts, yes it holds 2 D cells but they are in parallel for more current "longer run time". I found these at a web site called Doctors Foster and Smith, they sell pet stuff and had these air pumps at under $5 bucks.

http://www.drsfostersmith.com

They come with a lenth of hose and a air stone. I did try the air stone on the smoker set up but I did not take a picture. It will diffuse the smoke so if you wanted the smoke to stay in a givven area then use the air stone, if you want it to shoot out then just use the hole in the smoke cartridges. In these pictures I enlarged the hole in the smoke cartridge in one picture. The air pump is a simple motor driven design that uses two simple flap valves to draw air in one inlet and push air out another outlet. I soldered the wires to the $3.77 atomizer " I bought on line from http://www.e-healthcigarettes.com/ "and ran the wires threw the air tube, at the pump end I just cut a slit in the tube about 1/2 an inch before the outlet connection to the airpump to get the power wires out. I used some heat shrink tubeing to hold the air tubeing to the heat atomizer.

[Eagle]

John thanks for the info. I am willing to build a ray gun with the smoke system ,,,but it has to meet certain criteria, so I'm going to need some help. The smoke has too come out of the barrel under force and instantly , at the same time as the lights and sound are activated. So I'm thinking of an accumulator or reservoir. When the gun is turned on the smoker would begin to fill the chamber. At the end of the charging cycle the trigger would be pulled. Tripping a spring loaded bellows, forcing the smoke out the barrel at a good rate of speed. Doable ?????

[robothut]

Here's the thing Eagle, the smoke will not be visible if proplled at a high rate of speed, just like smoke effects in movies the smoke effect happens after the shot has been fired and lingers around the gun or blaster area. You can do it but fast moving smoke can not be seen as it is dispersed in the air. Now you can do anything that you can do with a real cig for example. You could have a bellows that sucks the smoke from the filter (smoke cartridge) and then use the same bellows to expel the smoke just like a guy with a cig in his mouth. Blow it out to fast and you will not see it very well but blow it out in a nice even streem and its very visible. How about a different effect. what if a clear plastic tube was used as the barrel of the blaster, inside the plastic tube "at the handle end" you put in a lasor pointer. Now normaly you can not see the pointer unless it hits a object, but if the tube was filled with smoke you could see the lasor light shining down threw the clear barrle and if smoke was emitting from the end of the barrel then you should see the lasor light in that smoke trail as well. Even if the light was only visible a short distance in front of the blaster it would be cool. The light beam in the barrel would be cool too I think. Maybe the smoke should not emit from the end of the barrel maybe it should emit from holes or slots in the side of the barrel as a indicator of some great reaction taking place in the blaster.

[Eagle]

Thanks John....Perfect idea !!! I don't quite agree with the with the dissipation theory . If the air charge was accelerated through the accumulator , the smoke would not be forced through. It should be drawn through due to a negative pressure area created after the initial blast through the center of the accumulator . By any means,,your idea is right on.......the effect would be so cool. :rolleyes:

[robothut]

Eagle I when out to the shop and drilled a side hole in some clear plexi tube, I then placed the smoking set up you see in post with the battery fish tank air pump in to the hole and placed a lasor pointer in the end of the tube next to the smoker hole. The tube was long and I did not want to cut it short as I will need it one day for a robot project but this is what happened. The smoke was so dense in the tube next to lasor that it blocked the lasor from shining threw and out the end of the open tube. It glowed nicly near the lasor . But the cool thing happened when I turned OFF the power to the smoker and left the air pump ON. The as the air pump moved the smoke down the lenth of the tube the lasor light beam "about 1 inch long in this case" would move with it. So by turning the smoker power ON and OFF I was able to send visible lasor light bars that traveled down the lenth of clear tube, they would remain visible for about 1/2 inch past the opend end of the tube. Now a faster air supply like maybe the Bubble blower setup I used in other posts might give a better effect yet and if you come up with a bellows system that can blast the smoke out who knows what that might look like. Basicly use the clear tube as part of the accumulator and you might have some thing. I was not able to take pictures or video as my hands were full holding smokers, lasor pointer and turning ON and OFF the power too the smoker.

[Eagle]

I'm on my way to town for supplies. Spencers doesn't have crap anymore.