Sunday, August 30, 2026
We set up camp in the late morning / early afternoon. Camp involved putting up a tent shelter, with one side to block the morning sun, putting the propane tanks out into our fuel depot (10 feet away from anything, with some marker to keep people from running over them), and driving the art car off of the trailer. Ta-dah, done!
Somewhere in there we had cereal for breakfast, with milk. All hail the mighty mini fridge. Such a game changer out here, even if it’s tiny.
After all that was driving the art car to DMV (Department of Mutant Vehicles) on the playa and getting our daytime driving license. Art cars require pre-registration, which we had already done months before, then licensing on-site for day and night driving. Night driving requires a day license, so here we go.
The line was short this time, and moved quick. It probably took us a total of 90 minutes away from camp to license. We couldn’t drive around (except for licensing) until 6 PM, when Burning Man 2026 officially starts.
I set up more stuff when we came back, like Starlink.
I worked on getting the lights up on the art car using one of the two laptops I’d brought. I couldn’t get the Raspberry Pi working as a controller, it needed some development libraries which weren’t available, so I couldn’t compile the CNC software I wrote which runs the lights. I did some configuring of the back hatch, which didn’t have lights on it last time we were here, and got it integrated with the rest of the system.
The LEDs on the doors were doing strange things, which would be a theme for the week. The lights were sometimes not responding and freezing, indicating some signal or electrical issue. I worked on it some but couldn’t figure it out today, so we went with some out of sorts LEDs when we went for night licensing.
We didn’t want to drive the art car around tonight, so we parked it and got on our bikes, and toured the playa. We took some pictures.
