The Vision: Created in collaboration with the Ministry of Stupid Ideas (MSI), a Portland arts collective, this installation was designed to validate the power of "play." The project features an eight-foot-tall steel tripod topped with an eternally burning flame and a remote control kiosk. To combat the self-doubt that often stifles creativity, particularly in children, participants are invited to shout their "stupid" ideas into the universe and press a button. If the system "accepts" the idea, it triggers a lighting sequence acting as a fuse, culminating in a massive, 20-foot column of fire. The goal was to give participants a visceral sense of agency, showing them that their ideas can command powerful forces in the real world.

The Engineering: The system is built on a distributed microcontroller architecture using two Teensy 3.5 units, one managing the user interface at the kiosk and the other controlling the pyrotechnics at the tripod. These units communicate to synchronize the LED lighting effects with the valve actuation. Given the high stakes of releasing pressurized propane, the firmware utilizes a strict state-machine architecture with hardware-level fail-safes to ensure the valves can never remain open in an error state.

Thermodynamic Rate Limiting: A critical engineering challenge in large flame effects is the thermodynamic cooling of propane tanks. Rapid, continuous firing causes the liquid propane to boil off faster than it can absorb heat from the environment, leading to tank freezing and pressure loss. To solve this, I designed the "random coin toss" gamification not just as a narrative device, but as a hard-coded duty cycle regulator. The software probability algorithm effectively throttles the frequency of the large fuel dumps, ensuring the duty cycle remains within the thermal recovery limits of the supply tanks.