Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

In need of a fresh perspective- remote inflation and release of balloons

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Jim-0000:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 01, 2019, 09:03:41 am ---Plastic balloons, along with nylon/polyester strings and ribbons should be banned.
.................

--- End quote ---

They are in a growing number of countries.

IDEngineer:
I suppose children can always go back to playing with lawn darts.

Everything fun from when I was a kid is either banned or politically incorrect these days.

james_s:
Lawn darts were great, we played with them all the time when I was a kid. I find it rather sad that they were banned over a very small number of accidents involving improper use. I know I probably sound like an old geezer lamenting the state of the world but it really seems like we have become obsessed with protecting everybody from everything, thus bypassing natural selection and creating a generation of even more idiotic idiots. People who are shielded and protected from every threat the world has to offer never really grow up and never learn to deal with failure. Some of the most educational events in my life that left the most lasting impressions have been the occasional spectacular failures and times I had close brushes with death or serious injury. A bunch of my friends have kids and it's crazy the stuff I see, it makes the most neurotic and paranoid overprotective parents I ever encountered in my childhood look almost reckless.

Ian.M:

--- Quote from: M4dsc1enti$t on April 30, 2019, 04:23:08 am ---I'm working on a project to remotely fill and release balloons,
....
For those that are curious,I'm planning on making fulgerite from silica with lightning,hence the remote activation.

--- End quote ---
A free balloon wouldn't be any use for attracting lightning, therefore the balloons the O.P. is planning to release must be tethered, and wont fall foul of free ballon release laws.

For a simple cheap and reliable release mechanism, consider a wooden clothespeg with the spring reversed so it opens itself, held closed by a loop of fusewire or by a  polyester thread tied round it and a low-ohm resistor.   Blow the fusewire with a current pulse, or melt the thread by overheating the resistor to release the ballon.

For the inflation, probably the easiest option would be to use a chemical hydrogen gas generator.   The quantity of reagents used can be chosen to provide the desired volume of gas not to over or under inflate the balloon.   See https://www.thatsgeeky.com/2011/11/producing-hydrogen-gas-using-sodium-hydroxide-and-aluminum/

If the sodium hydroxide solution is held back in a reservoir by a wax plug, that plug could easily be melted by a coil of resistance wire to initiate the reaction.

Jwillis:

--- Quote from: james_s on May 01, 2019, 11:39:34 pm ---Lawn darts were great, we played with them all the time when I was a kid. I find it rather sad that they were banned over a very small number of accidents involving improper use. I know I probably sound like an old geezer lamenting the state of the world but it really seems like we have become obsessed with protecting everybody from everything, thus bypassing natural selection and creating a generation of even more idiotic idiots. People who are shielded and protected from every threat the world has to offer never really grow up and never learn to deal with failure. Some of the most educational events in my life that left the most lasting impressions have been the occasional spectacular failures and times I had close brushes with death or serious injury. A bunch of my friends have kids and it's crazy the stuff I see, it makes the most neurotic and paranoid overprotective parents I ever encountered in my childhood look almost reckless.

--- End quote ---


Look to your left and to your right and see how many of us survived our medieval child hoods .Its astounding!

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