Rocket Illusion Electronics

Summer holidays, July 2019. I get a call. Unknown number.

“Hey, this is Scott. I’m a magician. I need your help.”

Scott & Muriel. World Champions of Magic. It’s two weeks before the premiere of their new act – a space themed illusion. There’s an idea, a box of parts, there’s Rick – the mechanical engineer, and very little time left. I got flown in to make the electronics work.

The concept – a rocket. Scott will climb in. Muriël cuts Scott into pieces with stainless steel blades, then launches the rocket. Warning lights. A countdown. Smoke coming from the tail. It goes from vertical to horizontal, then once in ‘space’, all the pieces – cut by the stainless steel blades – separate. Poor Scott. After a couple of circles around the earth, they come back together. The rockets lands. And – naturally – he comes out just fine. Only thing is that it’s the stage assistant coming out, not Scott. ;)

Scott had gotten parts and modules planning to build it himself, but ran out of time. The electronics had to control the lights, smoke machines, and lasers. It had to command beefy motor drivers to move the rocket segments apart and together, after they were ‘cut’ by Muriël. It ran of a Makita battery – so had to do some power / battery management. And it had to run everything based on Wireless DMX coming in.

It was tight getting everything in on time, firmware development and testing included. There were some very late nights in the theater. Including one after the premiere, when the female header pins for the processor board started wearing out from repeatedly swapping it with one with a new program. Those were some odd sporadic issues to debug! Glad the late night stupid multimeter beep test made me frown. Haven’t dared to use that style of female headers since.

It was a hell of a show in the end. Scott and Muriël are great at making you think you know what’s going on, only to fool you double. Looking forward to working with them more often. :)