Guitar Hero-controlled fire organ

Chris Marion (Andover, NJ) is an amazing teenage maker I found out about through element14’s website. I love his “About” statement:

If you look up “Chris Marion” on Google, you will find a folk singer and a professional photographer. What you won’t find is a high school student routinely doing incredible projects on his own time and trying to change the world for the better. The intent of this website is to change that. I will try to paint an accurate picture of my ever-changing life by expressing myself through my website.

Above is an awesome project he’s done to create a propane fire organ controlled by a Guitar Hero guitar. Here he describes his initial idea (riffing off of Mikey Sklar’s fire trampoline).

Simply interface a Guitar Hero controller to a microcontroller that would power some relays which would in turn fire off solenoid valves on five individual fire poofers! Now this could be cool; a large fire “sculpture” that is playable by anybody. Read on to see how I turned this idea into reality in a week’s time!

FireHero