grant Imahara was on hand at the Hackaday SuperConference for a fireside chat led by Sophi Kravitz and Chris Gammell. You know grant from his work on the television show MythBusters. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, is known for his work on robots and special effects, he’s the engineer behind the Energizer Bunny, and has even competed on BattleBots. Over the past year he joined with Mouser electronics to promote engineering through their Empowering development together campaign. Mouser was one of the sponsors of the 2015 Hackaday prize and they were pleased to work with grant to make this appearance possible.

The discussion starts off with a recollection of the MythBusters experiment that made grant worry for his life. They first prototyped a non-dairy creamer powered fireball on a small scale using an air-cannon and a road flare. The flare won’t ignite the creamer when it is at rest. but when launched into the air it disperses, crosses the Stoichiometric Ratio, and ignites. The successful test led to ordering a pallet of the creamer and creating a substantial fireball on the bomb range.

In the first five years of the show the hosts were responsible for taking out the trash — it was in the contract. Not a big deal, we take out our own trash as well, but it drives home the point that they weren’t merely on-screen personalities. In fact, each 22-minute episode was put together on an incredibly tight schedule. grant recalls the entire process involved just 10-days per episode. This included coming up with the ideas for the experiments, prototyping, executing, and filming them.

Grant lines up the samurai sword swinging apparatus
To make this possible it was required to have a very quick process of acquiring proficiency at new skills. grant also never threw anything away. One example of this is a sword-wielding robot which was used to test the ability of one samurai sword to slice through another. The apparatus needed to swing the sword very quickly. When they were finished with this episode the device went on the shelf until they needed to swing a sledgehammer. From there it was a quick hack to change the axis on which the execute rotated. This reuse saved a ton of time.

Grant Imahara poses with Hackaday prize 4th place winner Eric William during the Hackaday Superconference [image source]In his own shop grant is working on a new build. He plans to fabricate his own BB-8 replica. This will be done completely from scratch and will include all of the features seen in the new movie.

When speaking on this topic in the video above, he mentions a few very interesting things about star Wars robot appearances. When he worked for industrial Light and Magic he in some cases played C3PO at events. This was because the company wanted to make sure the appearances put the best example forward for their brand. but lately, they have in some cases hired fans to work events. This is because the replica builds have become so beautiful over the years that they are every bit as amazing as what the company produces.

It was terrific having grant Imahara at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference. If you didn’t get a chance to meet him there, you can connect with him on Twitter: @GrantImahara.