Luminous Elements

Burning Man is an event which by its nature asks a lot of its participants. If you don’t go with the attitude of “I’ll damn well thrive, come hell bugs or high water winds“, you won’t last long. Art projects don’t just show up — they take determination from the moment of “I’m going to bring this crazy thing to the desert” right up until you dismantle, gift, or burn your project (and if you burn it, you’ve then got ash to deal with… nope).

The Tripper Trapper made a good blocker for the front of our camp, serving to lead people into our bar while simultaneously walling off our shower, greywater evaporation pond and generators (i.e. all the stuff people don’t want near their tents) from the outside world.

The funny thing about things that are shaped like other things is, a lot of the time, they act like the things they are shaped like. This means when your project consists of what amounts to a giant sail, it’s going to catch the wind.

I didn’t come here to babysit

“You know something, princess? You’re ugly when you’re angry.”
— Lone Starr

What I hadn’t factored into the construction of the Tripper Trapper was this one simple thing. While I had fortunately arrived after the huge pre-event dust storm, the winds throughout the week steadily built back up.

I had spent the Monday and Tuesday hanging around the camp, keeping an eye on my structure to make sure it wasn’t going to blow away. Turns out, being constantly worried about the structural integrity of an installation is not a very fun way to spend your burn. It wasn’t until I was luckily dragged away on Wednesday afternoon that I realised that I’d been irritable and generally not a lot of fun for the entire first two days. I finally started to enjoy my burn, and had a wonderful afternoon (as every day can and ought to be in that magical place).

When I returned Wednesday evening, the front of the camp looked unusually exposed.

Damage report

Turns out, I’d been right to worry. The wind had kicked up later that afternoon, and caught in the narrow arc of the inner circle of the Trapper. This focusing of force resulted in a plethora of snapped bungee balls, and three eyelets torn right out of the tarp. It had been noticed just in time by my campmates who were bartending at the time, and they had removed the tarp and bunched it up in a corner of our lounge.

One of the structure’s ribs had come loose from its rebar stake, and gotten snagged on some LED strip, which became its only anchor point (as one might expect, this resulted in a break in the data lines at the point where the strip was tied to the rib). One of the data lines leading up to the LED strip had had its crimped terminal ripped off (and I’d tested each of these crimps by yanking on them pretty hard, so this must have been a lot of force). The remaining lights were still happily bouncing along, however.

Looks better naked

A campmate poses in front of the now-uncovered Tripper Trapper

After maybe an hour of fixing up the structure so that it was no longer being held together by LED strip, I took a step back to view it from a distance. It actually looked more recognisable for its shape without its walls. Although it was now missing the reflective finish from the inside, from the outside everyone could see the chevrons as they moved along the ribs. Note to future me: make installations visually appealing from the outside, too.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself when this guy’s actually going to showyou a photo of the damn thing. Well, here’s the part where I grin sheepishly, pause for a moment… and admit that I never actually took any photos of it. And not only that, but no-one from camp reports having any pictures or footage of it either. Update: found one! It’s not nighttime and it’s not running, but it’s better than nothing. It’s more than a little frustrating, but there’s nothing left to do but keep on keeping on, I guess.

Postmortem

Here’s what I can say about the project:

• The “monkey hut” can be an effective structure, and is relatively quick to assemble out of cheap parts, but it is not durable. Other monkey huts on playa this year showed a lot of damage from the high winds.
  • It is also a structure that only works in a straight line. In a linear configuration, even a transverse wind will go over the top, distributing its force evenly across all of the ties, bungee balls, and ribs.
  • In the quarter-circle arc that the Trapper’s monkey hut was built, the arc acted as a sail. Winds coming from the inside of the arc focused the force to a much smaller area, which quickly snowballed (can we call it “structural runaway”?)
  • Modifying a structure without understanding how your modifications will affect its strength is asking for trouble
• The power storage system operated flawlessly the entire week
  • This was the system which I predicted as being the most troublesome, thus it became the system I spent the most time on out of the entire project. This definitely paid off, as everything in that strange white box survived.
  • I had tuned the charge controller a little on the low-voltage side, predicting that playa temperatures would get a lot higher and that charging would need to be much more cautious. This turned out to be a non-issue, because even when it warmed up outside, the Powerhaus had ventilation to spare. Every time I checked the battery temperatures using my 4-digit probe, none of them were noticeably hotter than ambient, even while charging.
  • The battery didn’t get a lot of charge from the PV panels on Thursday and Friday because of the constant dust storms, but an AC charger running from the camp’s generator was able to easily top it up.
• Speaking of power, the cheap DC-DC converters I got were pretty terrible. While they did the job, they got hot enough that the stickers started melting off the heatshrink wrapping. Which, for some reason was wrapped around the heatsink. They were also a pain to mount without any case to speak of.
  • Next time, POL converters go on the ground, and we take the hit of extra resistance. The tiny gain in efficiency was not worth the effort.
  • Next time, they go in a case. Dust got everywhere in these things, and I have no idea how many will work next year.
  • It might be worth buying some DC-DC boards from China and thermal-gluing them to an aluminium case. Even if the case was completely smooth, it would be a better heatsink than purpose-built ones wrapped in plastic (seriously, WTF).
• A $70 crimper will make a crimp that fares pretty well when it comes to crimp strength — certainly better than what you’ll get from a $20 crimper — but it’s not magic. Apply enough force and your crimps will come undone. This might not be the case for the $500+ tools if the reason for their expense is that they have actually been blessed by Hephaestus.
• Take photos of your work when you’re done. Ask people to take photos as you’re working. If you have enough people in your camp, there’ll always be someone sitting around, even when it looks busy. Every so often, find one of these people and hand them your camera and have them snap a shot or two. If you aren’t at Burning Man, find someone else, or take your own photos. But take photos. More than zero of them is a start.
• Zip ties are cheap and convenient, but applying over a hundred of them to a single structure takes time. They also start to wear on your fingers after the first twenty.
  • Doubly so when you have to hold LED strip up to the frame while you’re doing it.
    • Triply so when that zip tie has to wrap a power transmission line and a power distribution line adjacent to the LED strip.
      • Quadruply so when you miss one of these lines and end up using Yet Another Zip Tie.
  • Moral of the story, zip ties take time, so try to do as much work as possible upfront to minimise setup time.
• Test everything early! Structurally, electrically, personally — every way. You don’t know what will go wrong until you try it. Even if you don’t set it up in full, set it up in full scale. If this means using 15 metres of cable and you don’t have that kind of space, leave most of it coiled up in a heap on the floor. Just set it up somewhere, somehow. Do this early enough to actually have time to fix the problems you inevitably find.