The Burn Baby Burn is a small nichrome burner module that can be used to burn through rubber bands or fishing line to create release systems. Common uses for small nichrome burner release systems are antenna deployment, freeflight plane de-thermalising, parachute reefing or cut down systems for High Altitude Ballooning (HAB).

The Burn Baby Burn board is designed to be fired by a small single cell LiPo battery using a PWM signal connected to the “S” signal pin. Of course you can low the PWM duty cycle but when driven at maximum in testing at 3.7V the burner draws around 1.2A. For most bands and fishing line it only needs to fire for a second and the cutting will usually occur in the first few milliseconds.

It’s been tested with long burns and the PCB has stood up well thermally with no melting of the solder connections holding the DIY nichrome coil. A mount hole on the left on the board can be used to tie the board into a system and an optional header pin pad behind the coil can be populated (as shown in the video) and formed into a hook shape to retain a band or line to be cut. There are 4 other header pin pads with pins provided should you want to fit them. As well as the signal pin and +- battery connector pins there is an extra “-” to connect back to the ground plane of your chosen microcontroller.

The design files and a couple of MicroPython examples for Raspberry Pi Pico are all available on this repository and the “Burn_Baby_Burn_Pull_Pin_To_Fire” example uses one of my Pull Pin switches available on this store. That example is a practical example of how you could pull a switch when deploying a parachute (pull pin deployed by a short pull line) and after a time delay the reefed parachute cuts away a reefing loop to deploy fully. But there’s probably heap of applications I haven’t even considered!