This is what I made for the final project!

Inspiration

Retro game, Bubble Bubble! :D and Lady Gaga's outft for her cray performance.

I thought that it would be cool to have different sizes of bubble with fog that has good scent inside and give the user to feel of magic power to generate it.

Idea Sketch

Mechanism

Inspired by this mechanism, Iris, I modified the design to have it smaller size and make it able to be fabricated using plastic material and laser cutter.

Quick prototyping the mechanism of bubble iris using stirngs. The inner triangle area will generate the bubble film and the size of the triange controls the bubble size.

CAD

CAD for IRIS mechanism for making variable-sized bubbles. Front, side, back side view.

Cool fitting on my head ;)

I went through lots of design iteration. First started with the mask version, then moved onto a hat version, finally a device with a handles and convertiable to place on a desk for interior design stuff.

Materials

Here is the list of the materials required for building the bubble-smoke mask.

List of Materials

Fabrication

In order to see how the fit goes with my face, I just printed the front part of the mask using Formlabs 2 using Clear resin.

This was for estimating the actual size compared to head (this was for the very first process when I was planning to make this project as a bubble mask, but I changed it to make it hold by two hands or putting it just on a desk)

Iris Mechanism Development

To make the outer structure of the bubble machine, I used a Derlin sheet(1/8'' thickness) and cut it using a laser cutter. To find the proper setting to cut it clean, I was testing by tunning the power and speed, PPI parameters.

And found that these following setting was good for cutting a 1/8'' thickness Derlin sheet

Speed: 0.8% (less than 1%)

Power: 100%

PPI: 1500 (more than 1300)

To fix the Bubble Iris structure onto the base, I cut the acrylic rod.

Smoke Diffuser

Bubble Recipes

I used the "Mike's Stir & Go" bubble recipe on this site.

Pour hot water and sprinkle J-lube, stir it well

Pour cold water having the ratio (hot : cold = 2 : 1) and stir

Put the Dawn to have a ratio ( hot water : Dawn soap = 13 : 1) and do not stir it. Just let it drawn.

As soon as sprinkle baking powder, stiring the mix for a min. The baking powder controls the stickiness of the solution which affects the bubble film tension.

and it works perfect!

Test with different inputs

My first intention to start this project was controling the bubble size based on the voice level or the amount of the speach. So I tested to control the servo using the electret board I built for the 'Interface' week.

Demo!

Fortunatley, I just got my device make bubbles like 30 mins before the final presentation. Before that it was just keep making a bubble film but not able to blow it out. I tunning the fan speed and the position relative to the bubble film was really important. Also, putting a cone-shape nozzle around the fan was helpful to make the air flow more focued.

Original video