Skip to content

Building The Flux Capacitor

Published

I’m building a FLUX CAPACITOR for my garage to display next to my EV charger.

In the Back to the Future franchise, the DeLorean time machine is a time travel device made by retrofitting a DMC DeLorean vehicle with a “flux capacitor”. The flux capacitor is a piece of technology that makes time travel possible when the car accelerates to 88 miles per hour.

Although it’s described as the thing that makes time travel possible, the precise mechanism it works by isn’t ever explained. The flux capacitor is built by Hill Valley inventor Emmett “Doc” Brown and powered, originally, by plutonium stolen from Libyan terrorists.

You can buy a repro flux capacitor from a key chain size to a full sized model such has this one for $200.

But where is the fun in buying something when you can make one yourself? I’m mostly following the online guide that I found here:

Back To The Future – Build your Flux capacitor – Open Electronics – Open Electronics

The project uses an Arduino to run the Neo Pixels. The basic set up for the Arduino is as shown in this diagram. They added an optional button switch to change the color of the lights. You can skip this part.

The only thing missing in the guide is the code for the Arduino. I found that the basic Adafruit NeoPixel example sketch gives one a good start for programming the LED light strips. From this you can change the color, add delays to slow it down etc. Here is the basic code to get you started.

  1. #include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
  2. #define PIN            5  // Pin where NeoPixel is connected
  3. #define NUMPIXELS      8  // Number of NeoPixels
  4. Adafruit_NeoPixel strip = Adafruit_NeoPixel(NUMPIXELS, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
  5. void setup() {
  6.   strip.begin();
  7.   strip.show();  // Initialize all pixels to ‘off’
  8. }
  9. void loop() {
  10.   for(int i=0; i<strip.numPixels(); i++) {
  11.     strip.setPixelColor(i, strip.Color(255, 0, 0)); // Red color
  12.     strip.show();
  13.     delay(50);
  14.     strip.setPixelColor(i, strip.Color(0, 0, 0)); // Turn off the pixel
  15. }
  16. }

Some of the parts I gathered for this project.

Cases for the Flux Capacitor can be found online for example: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5164173

The actual case or enclosure used in the movie was from a company named Stahlin who no longer manufactures that exact case. They do make something similar like the one below which costs almost $200 and is only 8 inches high, 4 inches deep and six inches wide.

Categories:Uncategorized