Surprised your had it running at full speed. Hey it's me Destin welcome back to Smarter Every Day.
This is Mark Rober.
Mark is using me.. Is this true or false? - [laugh]
- Mark is using me to access you subscribers. I'm not really happy about this Mark.
- That is a false statement. - That's exactly what's happening.
[music]
Alright. So in the field of engineering, people always celebrate these
awesome great achievements but they never really think about all the failures that it took to get to that point.
Well this video's different. In this video I'm gonna show you the failures that we experienced
when we're trying to make a bullet time rig using a phantom high speed camera.
OK so I brought a high speed camera out here. Mark did this GoPro rig with an armature
and he could see around things. It's kind of like simulated bullet time
only with movement, so we're gonna try the same thing with high speed with this rig
that they've built. And have you ever had it up to full speed? - No it's too dangerous. [laugh]
- This is dumb. We're in the middle of the desert.
We're doing high speed in the dark? Whose idea was this? [laugh] So we've got a mirror apparatus.
- That's right. So basically the way it works is, this whole thing is fixed.
What we did is basically attach it to a DC motor. Watch the camera lens. - Got it.
- And then you have a, you plant the camera down here so it's stationary and then the light
goes from here out to here and then it bounces up here.
So up here you'll have like a watermelon. - Gotcha. - If you're gonna explode it, and because this is
spinning around so fast, it's effectively like the camera's out here
itself, but this is just a more safe way to do it. - So 80/20 is a type of
extruded aluminum that engineers geek out with a lot, and so basically
you get this cross section and then you can use bolts and stuff like that. Ken would you like to talk
about your creation? - If it's out of balance in any way, shape or form, if
the centre of gravity doesn't line right on this axis of the motor,
of the spin, the whole thing is gonna wobble and orbit and
essentially we could generate enough forces that the whole thing would either catastrophically
fall apart, or we could have parts fling off at us
and it could be quite dangerous. So that's why you've got it strapped off here right?
Thanks Ken, running out of light. Let's do it. [laugh]
Got a tripod head. So this is the camera
tripod mount. This is Ken's, but we have to put it down
below the mirror, get our distance right so that we don't have
mechanical interference.
- And we've got a propane balloon.
(Desin) OK and how're you gonna light it? - So we have a neon transformer here,
and when we set it off, we're gonna see a spark jump across this gap
and I placed a match head in between that so that the
propane itself will ignite. - Aren't you clever. Oh this is a cool shot. So in the background there
is NASA's Jet Propulsion Labratory. (Destin) Not as cool as what we're doing in this
sketchy little river bed. - And 3.. 2..
1.. fire. [pop] Oh no. [laugh]
(Destin) My thought is, when it's going boom, all that propane is pushing down,
and there's no oxygen mixing with it, and it's just blowing away.
- I believe that. - Why do you have your glasses on? (Destin) Safety. [laugh]
- 3.. 2.. 1.. [pop]
[laughs] Yess!
- Science!
[cheering]
(Destin) OK now we're going to do what? - Alright now we're gonna speed test
the system... Speeding up.
- OK Pull it out, it's struggling. (Destin) Oh come on man, look at that.
[laugh] (Destin) Art. - Fine. - We're on.
- You see that mode
it's that plate that bends. (Destin) Alright, alright, alrighhhht - Stop-stop-stop-stop! Ohhh.
- I think we're... (Destin) Was it rolling? - I don't know if I was.
[moan] (Destin) Look at camera, look at camera. What are you thinking right now Mark?
- It's recoverable. Arrrgh, you learn from your
errors. I want to kill you. [laugh]
So basically the centre of mass on this mirror isn't lined up with the axis of
where we have the bolts, so it's sort of a weak, so essentially.. (Destin) It's just a friction
- It's a friction joint here, so there's an offset sort of a moment, that was
causing this to come out. (Destin) So basically the centre of mass of this
mirror is a few inches below the hinge point. - The hinge point, right. - And so that
creates a moment about that friction joint, and then once you get to that
certain rotational velocity then.. - It was just too much. It overcame that friction
and then we contacted right here. - Alright let's run through our failures. Number one.
It was too dark because my plane came in late. Number two the balloon
couldn't pop the way we wanted it to so we had to use a torch. Number three we didn't line the camera up
right with the armature. Number four if you use a mirror you'll lose about
30% of the light by the time it reflects off the surface. The solution for this is to use
what's called a front surface mirror which basically has the reflective surface on the outside
That way the light doesn't have to go through the glass to get to the reflective surface. Number five
of course is the mirror slipped and banged against the armature. The fix for this was to put a mechanical
hard stop in position. And finally fire's really not that interesting in this setup.
If you think about it, you've got this big flame that's kind of nebulous and there's no real point you can
focus on. Even though we had all these failures this is part of the design process.
Once we worked through all these failures we were able to come up with this.
[music]
OK if you want to see more of this Matrix footage because it's amazing then go check out Mark Rober's channel.
I subscribed to him a long time ago. He earned my subscription with the Mars rover video, and also
his road kill video and if you give him a shot I bet he'll earn yours too.
Anyway I'll leave a link over here on the side. If you want to check him out, give him a shot.
OK this video was all about failure, which is why for today's sponsorship on Smarter Every Day
I'm gonna recommend the book Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz. If you don't know who this guy is,
he's pretty awesome. He was in mission control from the apollo program
even before that, Gemini even. He was there for Apollo 13. Anyway, human lives were on the line
they stared failure in the face and they beat it. It's pretty awesome. So you can listen to this if you go to
audible.com/smarter, download this book, it's pretty awesome. I'll leave a link
in the video description. - [Arnold Schwarzenegger accent] Go download the book now! - I'll leave a link in the video description
you can click it. Wrong way, turn right. Don't fail.
We just missed our turn. [laugh] Failure is not an option.
audible.com/smarter. Um, download a book..
- [in Schwarzenegger accent] Get to the website now! - Support our sponsors. Thank you very much
I'm Destin, you're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one.
[ Captions by Andrew Jackson ] captionsbyandrew.wordpress.com
Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.