I met with Savant Home Automation who make a very powerful and extensible home control system. And they even have a brand new interface for iPad. In essence, we have to create a configuration file in their Blueprint software and presto you can add a LiveSpark fire device to their interface.

Now they have a lot of buttons, pretty much echoing what you’d find on a remote control. But I think that’s not going far enough. To control a fire device, like the LiveSpark Chandelier, you probably don’t want a set of buttons or sliders. Even with multi-touch that would only let you control just a few flames at a time, and the patterns of fire probably wouldn’t be very pretty or interesting, just localized pulses.

In designing our iPad application, we started with the concept that no matter how you touch the interface, beautiful flame patterns should be the result. And of course, we want to leverage multi-touch. What we came up with is two simple controls, a 12-pointed star and an intensity slider.

Control the LiveSpark Chandelier with an iPad

When touching the circles at the tips of the star, and individual flame can be controlled. As the touch moves toward the center, more of the flames neighbors light and increase their intensity. In the middle of the star, all flames are lit, and their intensity can be adjusted simultaneously with slider.  There’s also a 3D model of the chandelier which shows the glowing flowers in red along with the star, and the real fire.  Of course this takes two paragraphs to explain, but all becomes pretty obvious after a few seconds in your hand.

Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about where you can try out the iPad interface and see the chandelier light up in perfect time to your gestures.

The chandelier’s ten-petal flowers are fabricated from 3/16″ aluminum petals which are then high-temperature powder coated in a gloss white. They are equipped with mounting hardware that accommodates a vertical configuration Flame Element capable of 3 feet of fire, modulated at 30 frames per second.

One goal we stated early in the chandelier project was that we want each tube (grass blade) to have an extremely clean finish.  In competition with that goal was the constraint that the chandelier be portable, or at least shippable by normal freight.  This meant that in our fabrication we would need to split each grass blade into several sections.  But once a section of tube is split and rejoined there’s an unsightly seam that breaks the continuity of the piece.  So, here’s our solution to reducing the seams in stainless steel tube to nothing more than a hairline, invisible from more than a few feet away.

What makes a seam visible in the first place?  It’s the misalignment of the two tubes being joined, or irregularity of the joining faces.  The more irregular and non-coplanar the tube faces, the larger the gap between them and more visible the seam.  If the tube faces are extremely flat, smooth and coplanar, the seam between them will almost disappear.

Our solution comes in two parts, first we fabricate a tube facing tool with a pilot to align the blade with the end-of-tube axis.  Next we pull the pieces of tube together tightly using internal steel cabling.

As the test piece shows, the two seams are practically invisible, even though one is only a foot or so from the camera (the other is about six feet away).  It’s true that finish also comes into play.  If these tubes had a mirror finish, the imperfection at the joint would become a more visible irregularity in the finish, but since we’re using a radial sanded finish to the stainless steel, the seam blends into the finish grain and fools the eye.

We have designed the sconces that will surround each Flame Element of our Chandelier.  They will most likely be powder coated 1/8″ aluminum.  Each sconce contains 10 petals that interleave to form a surrounding shape.  The sconces and Flame Elements will both be easily removable for cleaning or repair.

As part of the fabrication of our new chandelier, we needed to bend 20 stainless steel tubes.  The tubes are 2.5″ in diameter 304 grade with 0.065″ wall.  First we performed several tests on the rollers to make sure the tube wouldn’t buckle or crimp.  All went well so we purchased the material, got the bend radii from the CAD model and bent our tubes.  Here is the result.

Our latest project we’re fabricating now is a chandelier.  It’s 16 feet tall with a dozen flame points, each of which can vary from a candle’s height all the way up to 36″ and change 30 times per second.  Think of an iTunes visualizer or a graphic equalizer drawn in fire.  All the fire is certified and available for either indoor or outdoor use.

The chandelier can hang from a ceiling or our stand, indoors or outside, even over a pool.  It is fabricated from stainless steel with white porcelain sconces around each Flame Element.  It emanates flames that are pre-programmed or that respond to any music input, and would be beautiful for live performances.  It can connect to any standard natural gas line or propane source.