Great Balls of Fire!

Just when we were beginning to wonder at the recent dearth of hardware hacker projects involving explosives and machine learning, YouTuber Nathaniel F. has come through for us and built a mind-controlled flamethrower that he insists is totally not an actual flamethrower for legal reasons (no worries, Nathaniel, we believe you).

Mind control of the flamethrower is achieved, as you might expect for such a potentially dangerous device, with the help of a high-precision, clinically-validated electroencephalogram (EEG) machine to record brain activity. Well...not exactly. But Nathaniel did choose a very fine second-hand Mattel Mindflex toy from 2009 that he found on eBay for $16. Nevermind that the Mindflex has a very dubious reputation and the claim that it measures brain activity in any meaningful way is disputed. Hey, if you want to innovate, you have to think outside of the box, right? What could go wrong?

Nathaniel collected data from the Mindflex while he thought about using the flamethrower, and also about unrelated things (maybe he thought about proper burn care protocols?). This data was used to train a convolutional neural network to distinguish between thoughts about flamethrower use, and otherwise. A Raspberry Pi 4 was used to run inferences against the model in TensorFlow Lite.

The wrist-mounted flamethrower is powered by an Arduino Nano, and shoots a jet of flaming propane when triggered by the neural network. That jet is definitely less than ten feet (we have you covered, Nathaniel), but looks very impressive all the same.

With the device all put together, Nathaniel suited up with a little bit of protective gear and gave it a try. The flamethrower definitely did work, except when it did not. As a proof of concept, the mind-controlled flamethrower was a success, but you would not want to get too comfortable wearing it, because it does have some misfires.

What would you use a mind-controlled flamethrower for, you wonder? To cook bacon, of course. While you have to cook it like every other poor sap, Nathaniel just thinks about cooking bacon, and it is so. Although the initial tests roasting marshmallows did not work out, Nathaniel made some tweaks that will make s’mores fans everywhere happy. Or at least the types of s’mores fans that like the idea of carrying around a mind-controlled flamethrower.

I do not know what Nathaniel is planning next, but I sincerely hope that it will involve an unlicensed nuclear accelerator and an old Ghostbusters toy (on that note, do not think about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, whatever you do!). If you cannot get enough of this wrist-mounted flamethrower, be sure to check out Allen Pan’s punch-activated version.