Aladdin’s Flaming Hand Sanitizer

No genie, just Germ-X. This magical lamp shoots flames at the snap of your fingers.

Jeremy Cook
6 years ago

Today, for obvious reasons, there has been a lot of emphasis on washing your hands. While hand sanitizer is supposedly less effective than soap, it’s probably better than nothing. What’s not effective — or at least something that would do more harm than good — is burning “surgical spirit,” which is mostly isopropyl alcohol with a bit of boric acid mixed in to give it a greenish tint.

Nonetheless, when automatically dispensed from a 3D-printed lamp a la Aladdin and automatically ignited, it at least makes for a fun distraction. That seems to be the idea behind this project by Yele Labs.

The lamp body itself features a small air pump to push out small amounts of fuel, a 3-6V DC to 400kV spark generator, and a 18650 li-ion battery. The rest of the electronics are housed inside the blue base, which includes a Digispark board that activates the spark generator and pump at the same time via a relay module. There's also a KY-038 microphone unit that detects the snapping of fingers or a sufficiently loud noise, triggering the lamp to shoot a flame... and grant your wish of entertainment apparently.

Such a build seems somewhat risky for both high voltage and fire safety reasons. However, at least it does have a very small sanitizer/fuel reservoir, so the fuel can only burn for so long. More info on the lamp can be found in Yele Labs' write-up, and you can see it in action below.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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