The compass that doesn’t point North. Obsessing over user experience for Burning Man.

Burning Man 2023 was the first “public release” for an idea that put all my skills to test.

What makes Burning Man special are the 80000 people that go there to express themselves and create an experience for others. It’s the only place where you have thousands of opportunities for unique adventures every day.

Now, how would you decide what to do? Through meticulous planning, or by going with the flow? Planning is tedious: you need to read through thousands of options and make decisions about each one. You’ll find events that are most interesting for you, but you’ll hardly ever get surprised.

Wandering out without a map is easy and exciting, but it’s easy to end up on a boring street and miss something great around the corner.

What if there were a solution that doesn’t require those compromises? That works almost like magic... Like that compass that Jack Sparrow had...

That’s how the idea was born.

We make things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy. - programmer's credo

Making it was a treacherous journey. I’ve had plenty of setbacks that threw me off schedule by weeks. Critical fixes were done the night before I was leaving for Black Rock City, and I got some programming experience at the festival as well.

The compass has three components: Magic, Science, and Ether. Let me explain and share one story about each.

1. Magic

From the beginning, I was obsessed with creating a magical experience for the person holding the compass. It had to be flawless and organic, as if it was designed by Apple. Every detail matters!

Why so? At Burning Man, people are in the middle of one of the most exciting events of the year, and technology is not allowed to subtract from the experience. On top of that, people are tired, and not always patient to spend energy on learning and dealing with glitches.

Magic is created by the holistic object experience: starting with the wooden box and leather lace, and ending with only two user interaction elements - the opening lid and the spinning dial.

Flawless experience requires extensive testing. With the compass, we went on a churros hunt with my kids, and did explorations with my friends, but the most fruitful test was at YOUtopia - a regional BM event back in May.

I uploaded the art objects map and spent two days there walking with the compass. Among a dozen other learnings, I noticed an inconvenience: the direction is not visible at night without a flashlight. Yeah, it’s natural to use a flashlight at night, but it is not magical.

As I got back, I returned to the drawing board to solve the problem. Making the dial visible is not very hard, but not trivial either:

1. can't use electrical sources of light on an ancient mechanical device
2. glow-in-the-dark materials need charging
3. the lid is closed most of the time, so the Sun wouldn’t charge the dial

I ended up using a phosphorescent material and hid a black light LED inside the box. LED works only when the box is closed, and for the user the dial magically keeps glowing all night.?

2. Science

Science is the electronic hardware that makes the compass work. That's where I had to learn a lot and dive into an unexpected level of detail.

To point in the right direction, compass needs to know:

1. Orientation: which way is north
2. Destination: where should it point to
3. Direction: where the dial is currently pointing

With that, the motor can spin the dial until the arrow points to the destination regardless of the orientation.

To find north, the compass sensor (3d magnetometer) is used. It works very similar to a classic compass - finds where the magnetic field is pointing. The dial position is determined by an angular encoder that captures the orientation of the magnet glued to the main axle. You can see where it is going: I placed a spinning magnet next to a compass sensor. Rookie mistake. Early prototypes were large enough for me to overlook the problem, but when I assembled the first small board - magnetic reading went all over the place. For a second (~48 hours) I had a real depression, bordering on a panic attack, as it felt like everything was futile: how can you make a compass that has a magnet in it? Has anyone even tried this before?

Not willing to give up, my mind was spinning: Can I change the design? Can I fix the original configuration? Using Elon Musk’s principles, I looked into the fundamental principles - the physics of what’s happening. At the core, I have a system of two magnets: the Earth and an axle, and I’m reading the sum of the two.?

At first, I tried to remove the “noise field” by building a Faraday cage, but the shielding material was not efficient enough in this setup. The other option is to subtract the Axle field (“noise”) from the sensor reading. That would leave me with Earth’s field values. All it takes is to find the compensation parameters for each axle position (I ended up doing it for every 15 degrees and interpolating in between). A manual test within a small range confirmed that it works. The full calibration process would take 1 hour of spinning the compass in all directions to collect 48000 readings, so I spent a weekend building a calibration rig using Lego.

Seeing the compass work again and reliably point to a destination was such a huge relief.

3. Ether

Ether here is the supporting software that makes it all work together.

The project required surprisingly large amounts of code: parts calculator, calibration scripts, Bluetooth diagnostics web page, map processors to convert schedule into internal format, and finally, the firmware for the controller.

As the Burning Man was rapidly approaching, one critical task remained incomplete: choosing actual destinations for the compass. Out of 4500 events, I needed a curated selection of ±200 options per day. How to choose?

I was too busy assembling units and fixing firmware, so there was no way I could review the event list myself. So I turned my to crowdsourcing. I knew I could rely on my friends for some help, but if I wanted to review for hundreds of events - I needed to make it super easy for the user and add some incentive to invite more people to participate.

As mentioned in the beginning, the problem of planning the schedule exists for all burners. Compass is designed as a magical solution, but it’s not the only one. One way to reduce the burden is to share the work with trusted friends: if each person can select 10 events, then the camp would have 200-400 interesting activities. So I made a simple voting tool: a spreadsheet that showed the user a random description and options to vote. Each click would update the ranking, and show the next description. I sent the link to two camps with a promise to share a camp-created schedule. The tool itself is promising: it’s useful, and entertaining, and has a variable reward loop in it. My mistake, though, was choosing Google Spreadsheets which doesn’t have mobile editing capabilities. Still, I got enough help from people who were diligent enough to open the link on laptops.

How did the Burn go and what’s next?

My goal was to give the compass to people I didn’t know and let them have an adventure. I had time to assemble only three units, but still managed to share this experience with 4 people, and they had a great time.

Still, there are some lessons I learned:

1. I missed some great opportunities to share it with more people. I need to build more units for the next time, and that will require getting a CNC machine to reduce the assembly process from 4 days to less than one
2. Black Rock City and the layout move a little bit every year. I got lucky I got help from @Adnan Chahbandar, but I still wasted two precious days confirming the map. Next time I’ll have a straightforward validation procedure, and a mobile application to update the units on the fly.
3. There is always room to improve the experience by curating the destinations.

Still, the most important lesson is that I don't give up. I've faced major roadblocks and dozens of setbacks, I've had to acquire numerous new skills, I've set the bar higher than most people would've, but I still delivered.

• If you are interested, I shared some highlights from the building process on the Instagram channel https://www.instagram.com/lightdutydiy/
• Full feature list and design overview here: https://heavior.github.io/jack-sparrow-compass/