Wednesday, April 2^nd, 2008

    First we tried to pop two balloons to prove we can pop multiple balloons at the same time. We used tape to hang the balloons in the air. We tried several different methods of popping the balloons. At the beginning we used the thick wire and bent it into a U-shape to hopefully touch the two balloons at the same time. We used a hot plate to heat it up. But the balloon surface was just slightly burnt instead of immediately popping. Since the hot plate was not as hot as we expected, we switched to a torch. The torch was hot enough, as we expected, but we kept popping one balloon instead of both. So we thought it might be a problem with the thickness of the wire. We switched to two other kinds of thinner wire, none of which could store enough heat to pop even one balloon. Therefore, we concluded the problem was the unstableness of the air balloon in the air.

    After we found the problem, we decided to tape the balloons on a board to stabilize them. By heating the thick wire, we were able to pop both balloons. But on the camera it only showed one popping due to the slight time difference. So, we decided to use a flash delay to let both balloons have enough time to pop. The time delay would not affect the shape of the water ring and would provide enough time for all the balloons to pop. Finally, by using delay, we got a fairly good picture of two balloons popping together.

Two balloons popping on the card board using heated wire.

    After the first goal was achieved, we started testing if the same method worked on a water balloon. We started with water on the outside of the balloon instead of inside. The small amount of water drops didn’t show up very well in the photo. So we decided to fill the balloon with water and pop it. The first try was not successful either, because the balloon didn’t make a popping sound loud enough to be detected by the sound trigger. Then we learned from another group that we needed to fill some air in the balloon and pop the air part to make the pop noise. Therefore, after fixing this problem, a water ring was photographed successfully.

Popping a water balloon using heated wire.

    Therefore, we concluded that our goals are doable: popping two air balloons at the same time and popping water balloons using heated wire. So next, what we want to do is to make a model big enough for 5 balloons with wire on it to pop them. And we thought about using a laser to draw 2008 on the 5 balloon rings when we are taking the picture.

    Today, we first tried popping two balloons at the same time with the wire we used to pop the first water balloon. We discovered that it was extremely difficult to pop two balloons at once using this method, much less five. Next, we tried making a frame with meter sticks and wire to pop multiple balloons. However, the frame was difficult to move between the torch and the balloons, so we decided to pop the balloons from behind, with needles, instead. This setup was too flimsy because the cardboard with the needles was warped, so the balloons would not pop at once. Also, we had problems keeping multiple balloons on the other sheet of cardboard. We tried supporting them with paperclips, but this was too flimsy as well. We decided that our setup simply needed to be sturdier, so we ditched the cardboard and found a wooden door to hang the balloons on instead. We hammered nails partway into the door to support the balloons and drilled holes in the door in order to pop the balloons from the back. We found another, thinner piece of wood that we put more nails through. These nails corresponded to the drilled holes. Our idea was to push on the back of the small board so that the nails would poke through the drilled holes and hopefully pop all five balloons. We did not have time to try this out today because we spent the majority of our time working on the setup.