You people are amazing! A day-and-a-half, and we’re almost halfway there! We are all truly and completely humbled by how our community has come together to support this crazy idea. Thank you all SO MUCH!

Yesterday, a few of us got together in the shop for some preliminary work on the TPM (the Trusted Precipitation Module), aka the AMCP’s rain and mist subsystem. We tested the spray patterns and water consumption of a standard fire sprinkler and a smaller shrub sprinkler. Here’s a photo of our janky test rig taped to the hook from the bridge crane:

And here’s what the spray from the fire sprinkler looks like from 15 feet up. You can see Laura holding the controls, while Dan and our neighbor Greg with the tesla coils try not to get wet:

Both sprinklers work great, and the fire sprinkler in particular feels like a serious thunderstorm—it’s surprising how much water can come out of such a small object. There’s a few more ideas to try out, but we’re thinking we might install them both under independent control so we can easily change how hard the rain comes down.

In other news, platform CAD is coming along nicely. Our mechanical engineer, Lyra, put together some preliminary FEA for the aerial rigging, and our designs seem sound. We expect to move forward on the metal fabrication soon. We’ve also ordered all the materials for pixel prototyping, and should be lasering up some beautiful plastic cubes later this week!

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve received some requests for a captioned version of the video. We’re not sure if we can get captioning to work in the Kickstarter video player, but rest assured that we’re working on it and you can expect to see an audio-optional version on YouTube soon. Watch this space for further updates.

We love you guys! Thanks for making it rain!