Vanish Instantly with the Instant Vanishing Device

Smokescreens are a staple of fiction, but things are different in real world. Smoke-generating devices are real, but they’re mostly for signaling or creating general environmental obscurement. Caleb Rash wanted something more like what we’ve seen ninjas and Batman use in movies: a small device that creates a thick cloud of smoke in a small enough area to conceal a person.

The real-world use cases here are pretty limited — there isn't much value in hiding within a small cloud of smoke. However, this is much more cinematic and visually interesting than what exists in real life. But because this isn’t a normal strategy, there wasn’t a lot of literature available and Rash had to experiment to achieve his goal.

That experimentation centered around a custom-built smoke chamber, with a sensor system to quantify “smokiness” results from different combustibles. It has a red LED and a light sensor monitored by an Arduino UNO R3 development board. More smoke means less light reaches the sensor. Graphing the sensor measurements helped Rash figure out which methods create the most smoke and which do that the fastest.

Ultimately, Rash settled something called Sorbitol, which is a sugar alcohol. It burns at a low temperature and creates a lot of smoke when it does. He combined that with potassium nitrate as an oxidizing agent and paraffin wax to congeal it all into a solid substance that burns at a consistent rate.

That goes into a puck-style enclosure, with ports arranged radially on the outer perimeter to exhaust the smoke. For safety, it has a special inhibitor, based on a Hall effect sensor, that disables the device when it is its belt holster.

The final piece of the puzzle was ignition. That was actually the easiest part, because it is just a button that connects a battery to an electric match. Unless, of course, the puck is in its holster and that inhibitor has disabled it.

That was a success and now Rash has the kind of instant vanishing device you’d see in a movie.