I can’t think of a use for the window but I’d love to know more about ballistic art.
Back in those days I was more paranoid about cloud stuff so I didn’t have good backups of a lot of it,
but I still have some photos and videos from then.
Like when I destroyed a bunch of fruit at a gun range with a high speed camera over a tarp on the ground, used fixative to keep all the fruit carcass in place, and displayed the carnage as a walkable floor of guts.
Then there was my Chaos series of performance art where I had high speed projectiles loaded with paint and other items fired at canvas and myself holding canvas (when said project at least wouldn’t kill me). No, these weren’t so much painballs as rather some were the size of a nerf football coming out of a glorified spudgun
And then there is what really drove the need for building bunkers for the art, and that’s when I started firing at bullet resistant materials to just below the point of failure (and sometimes just beyond). At one point I had a gallery of that work at SMU back when I was a freshman, but that’s how long it’s been since I’ve had the time to do any of it. I still have most of this series… I’ve actually had a keyhole router bit sitting on top of their box for months now as I’ve intended to bring them by DMS and slot the wood frames to hang them. They originally were left freestanding for display so the angled spotlights could catch the cracks and impact points.
Some panels were explicitly bound and others not to cause different failure modes which create the dramatic fractures versus small impact points in others in the series.
(photo of the downrange setup)
I also like to experiment with various rounds. The following are what I call the blunderbus and power of the sun rounds
Then occasionally I wanted to get a wild animal shot but I know said animal could smash an unprotected camera in more ways than I can.
Last but not least of why I had the serious PPE for even my non-ballistic, no wild animals photography… I liked to make my own photo emulsions. Why is that dangerous? well it’s a Nitrate emulsion in particular… and I dipped entire canvases in it which means I had large quantities of an explosive of it in a bulk container at one point in time. I think the largest I did was a 24x36" but I don’t recall. The only surviving ones are small frames.
EDIT: how could I forget these:
I used to do a lot of art with Thermite and sculpture that would blow apart and I’d piece it back together.
One of the ones that seemed more popular with my peers was to explicitly use ceramic pots and sculpture made with a clay that does not survive the thermal shock of an Fe3O4 reaction (higher instantaneous heat than Fe2O3). Many pots explosively shattered and I’d scrunge for the remaining pieces.
and of course I think many at DMS are familiar with how I make the Blast Art on backside of my business cards (I’ve done it there numerous times before I put away the system for a rebuild).
I pump 5000 volts through a low inductance line to a piece of 28 ga copper magnet wire. With a low inductance, only a brief run of low gauge wire with noticeable resistance, and an oil filled capacitor the system can break 10,000 Amps with a rise time of about a millisecond. Business cards don’t need a shield when standing a couple feet away… but when doing other things I’ve had inductive coils blow themselves apart under the magnetic forces.
Needless to say the copper wire does not like this.
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Now any of this would be an awesome photography class to take at DMS! 
So I grew up in Commerce, and for a couple of years I had to go across the East Texas State campus to get to school. I used to cut through a couple of buildings to look at the display cases. There was a professor who had shot a bunch of different types of guns at ballistics gel, then filled the cavities with red wax (I think… it’s been a long time). At the time I thought they were awesome.
Then I see this stuff and realize that guy was an amateur. 
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Honestly ballistics gel is one of the few things I *haven’t * done that I’m really ashamed I didn’t do when I was more active.
Filling with wax and acrylics paints would have been nice.
If only we had the facilities to teach it… equipment isn’t lacking but minimum safe distances are
I can actually do a class on basic high speed photography for fast events using a basic triggered flash mechanism. I had to make an instructional video back in college for a magazine I used to write electronics articles for:
(and with that I think I’m gonna split this thread off to its own topic as the original point of this one is I’d still like to sell my panel :P)
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For me, it’s definitely about learning about high speed photography. We could do it with balloons popping for all I care. Yes…using ballistics would be awesome, but we don’t have the facilities and I’m not sure we would even be allowed to do something like that through DMS for insurance reasons.
I can make that happen (on a relative timescale of within a couple weeks due to work)
@Team_Digital_Media do we have flashes that use a standard boot mount?
@artg_dms @malcolmputer know if the Tanners donation has any SCRs or flash boot connectors?
EDIT: I may still have my old dual-core arduino for this. It was a prototype board some members of a forum put together with dual ATmega 328 chips. They shared a clock crystal and an I2C bus. I used one to drive the LCD interface and user inputs for settings adjustment, and the other as a real-time where it took the sensor calibration data and all it did was watch the sensors and trigger the flash on cue. If I have it i’ll ensure to bring it for the class.
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There may be SCRs among the transistors, regulators, etc. Probably in the bins along the back wall.
If you’re looking for a way to trigger an existing photo flash, I think a basic contact closure.will get the job done. Used this method w/ a Metz flash head. On the other hand - if you’re building your own flash unit…
Thanks. If I do scrunge something for the class I’ll make sure everything is ordered back the way it was and document it.
Too slow unfortunately
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Logic level FET?
It has to be able to trigger the high voltage and modest current from the pulse capacitor for the flash.
OK…this is a roll your own flash unit, not using an existing camera / photo flash?
It depends on what flash unit is available. I’ve encountered some flash units that basically the boot pins just were straight to the capacitor and tube, and others where you had a HV trigger that could be driven at a logic level.
If DM has one and I can measure that it’s a sane logic level then we can go the FET route… maybe I’m too used to working with flash units far older than I am
Sounds like your talking about a lab / industrial strobe unit.
Guessing that most camera / studio flash units are standardized on some kind of contact closure - mechanical or solid state - closure to gnd. That way you can mix brands and still have everything work. Might be able to trigger camera flash w/ CMOS buffer w/ open drain fet output. Some of the manufacturers give flash duration specs.
Was actually talking about a typical strobe, but since old strobes were used on cameras with mechanical closures to trigger they didn’t have to worry as much about what voltage or current flowed through. They were much simpler electrically, basically just charged the cap and waited for the short circuit on the boot to dump it.
I’m unsure what modern flashes operate on those contacts in the shoe. The flash duration isn’t as much a concern for this method of photography until you get to much faster events (in which case a pulsed laser is the way to go)
The biggest issue is you don’t want a unit with it’s own timing control for the triggering. Nikon and Canon logic for timing and signal capture tended to have a 100ms response time (even in 2012-2013 when I was last doing this) which is too long for this mode of operation. It has to trigger the flash directly. If the boot is just dumping the internal SCR or HV trigger then the flash works, if it’s direct wired to the cap that works. If it goes to an internal controller which then tells the flash what to do the response time tends to be too long.
I’ve done something similar but with much slower moving objects. It would be fun to try with faster stuff!
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This is all so interesting to read! I can’t wait for a class to learn more about this! 
Electrically the devices are very simple. I think from a class perspective the most value comes from learning how to stage the shots to trigger on the correct timing.
I usually would do trial runs with a ballistic chronometer to get the velocity of the projectiles, and depending on the speed and projectile type device an appropriate sensor mechanism.
For example I used to put foil on a rifle muzzle. The break in the foil, operating as an otherwise normally closed contact, when the round fired tells the controller that the bullet has left the barrel and to start its timing.
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LED strobe work? If flash duration isn’t important and trigger latency is, consider the following:
Cap Bank -> Pwr MOSFET -> LED Bank
Drive the FET gate hard and do a current dump into the LED bank via low impedance path. QED
ELab has TO-220 pwr fets that can handle this.
Any trigger latency will be primarily in the sensor / timer trigger ckts.
Not as sexy as playing w/ high voltage ckts, caps, trigger coils, flash tubes, etc., but just might get the job done.
To clarify I mean the flash duration being less important was just in relation to the trigger response time when using commercial camera equipment. Typical camera photostrobes will be within an acceptable range of flash duration, however they varied more wildly on the response time front.
I honestly don’t know the ramp up and cooldown time of LEDs well enough for them. Back when I did more of this it wasn’t practical purely from a light output perspective for most of them on a reasonable budget.