Ultimate Flame Bait: Liquid Cooled Arduino

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U-cc_Qcf-w]

We do so many things around here  just because “we can”. Though this guy cites this as his reason, we somehow can’t help but wonder if he’s doing it just to troll the Arduino hating crowd. He has decided to overclock his Arduino by replacing the crystal and dropping it in some non conductive liquid coolant. Can you guess what sketch he’s running? That’s right, he’s blinking an LED.

Normally we would point out that we have no preference when it comes to Arduino. We simply post what is submitted. Though we are often accused of being Arduino lovers, it is simply just another tool to us. We sometimes delete obnoxious comments that get off topic, threatening, or vulgar because that’s just good house keeping. That being said, we know what to expect here. Go ahead, bash the Arduino. Get it out of your systems. Just keep it non offensive or it will be moderated.

[thanks jfreak09]

156 thoughts on “Ultimate Flame Bait: Liquid Cooled Arduino

  1. arduino stories are offensive themselves so it is hypocritical to ask us not to be in our comments on the matter.

    but you have no reason to post this story. You even admit it is useless and likely just the author trolling, this just reeks of unprofessionalism.

  2. It makes me want to poop with excitement, its working in liquid…that is just crazy…I might try this with a Lexmark Scanner and scan my face super fast in the bath tub…I’ll control the motors using an Arduino + MotorShield tho’

  3. Shadyman, i was thinking the same thing, but does the arduino even have an idle instruction? Is heat mostly generated from GPIO? It would be fun to write 3-4 test sketches to try out and compare against the overclocked setup. Not just busy work either because we need to know if heat is affecting the results.

  4. Why is this liquid cooled? Don’t both the AVR and PIC chips have absolutely massive overclocking headroom anyway? It seems to me that he just took an AVR (which probably would have come close to that frequency anyway) and dunked it in blue goo.

  5. This is ridiculous, not because it’s an arduino but because most Microcontrollers aren’t limited in clock because of heat but because of instability. Also, 32Mhz isn’t that fast really. I’m willing to bet that it would run fine without the coolant. If it doesn’t, it just shows how superior the Microchip PICs are! :)

  6. I just don’t get this Arduino bashing.

    It’s a platform. End of story. It’s limited, it’s just a micro-controller, 8 bit and of an older generation, it’s mainly educational, so what? Why not bash the IBM-PC while we’re at it? It was crude, it was ugly, it was underpowered, yet it led to that nice little machine you are currently using to type your flames. Heck, in a way, you could even say it led to the current line of Apple computers.

    Be creative, build something, learn new tricks, have fun and use your brain instead of wasting your grey matter on useless and unproductive comments.

    Just my two cents (Canadian).

  7. I have been reading your site for yrs but i have to say you need to get off arduino some you are definitely missing out on other great hacks out there i love the idea of the arduino and all that it can do but im getting sick of reading about it i want to see more than that board all the time please move on or i will not support you guys anymore ….

  8. He should at least re-write the sketch to use a loop, instead of timers. Remember back in the 386 days, when you could change the speed of your games by pressing the “turbo” button that changed the CPU from 33mHz to 66?

  9. really cool about any electronic project becomes cooler by over-clocking and immersion in some colored liquid. blue is perfect, because blue is cold. don’t use fluorescent green, that’s always radioactive. since increasing speed is the more economic alternative to efficient coding, overclocking an arduino should be especially useful.

  10. The arduino is a tool. Just like a hammer, just like a soldering iron and just like the people who flame arduinos. And I’m certain that those people who flame at one time or another were enthralled by the arduino.

    @jonny5 – I can see where you are coming from, but I appreciate the arduino love because I’m just starting out and getting to know it. I hope this leads to me learning other protocols and whatnot, but you have to admit, it’s a heck of a springboard.

  11. Well, “because I can” is a perfect motivation. And overclocking still is a thing exotic enough. Let it be Arduino this time, then.

    The Blink sketch is a minimal indicator of a properly functioning core. Perhaps a more elaborate test could be developed, though ideally it’s up to Atmel :)

    But unproffesionalism there is strong. What coolant temperature allows for these 32 MHz instead of 16? (Fridges are not temperature standards.) And, are these 32 MHz an absolute limit – or we could hook up a signal generator to the XIN pin and squeeze out some more?

  12. I would guess that there are a lot of Arduino stories because a lot of people are hacking Arduinos; and I would guess that is because they are cheap and readily available. I remember not too long ago when micro-controllers cost big $$$ (relatively speaking). I am not exactly overawed by the Arduino, but I do give it credit for making it possible for lots of people to get involved.

  13. Interesting. Folks want Hackaday to do articles about projects using something *other* than Arduino. But since the point of that product is to get folks hacking, and it happens to be incredibly popular, wouldn’t you expect some very significant number of projects to just naturally use it? So, that’s what Hackaday reports. ‘Seems perfectly rational to me.

  14. “”We simply post what is submitted”. So you guys don’t do any spelunking in the dark reaches of the intertubes yourselves?”

    Do _you_, sneakypoo? When was the last time you submitted something? They say they only post what is submitted, so if You, the readers, don’t submit things you want to see how do you have room to complain about what is posted?

  15. @Phillipe

    I believe the point RE: all the Arduino hate is that while the IBM PC which was ugly and underpowered gave us the machines we have today, it was the AVR AtMega that gave us… the arduino. IE, there’s nothing an arduino can’t do that an AtMega can’t do natively. The issue is one of ease of use. The Arduino is certainly easier to use, but also comes at a much higher cost than the AtMega alone.

    The “haters” as it were simply don’t understand why the burgeoning hacker doesn’t just go with the Atmega or some other AVR in the first place…

    The AVR line of chips is rediculously easy to program and can be done with a serial port and a DASA cable. It was *DESIGNED* for easy programming and easy use.

    That’s probably why people despise the Arduino. Because to these people the Arduino seems like a massive waste of money for next to nothing. Consider the Deumilanove at Robotshop.ca for instance, it’s over $30.00, in comparison the AtMega chip it uses retails for about $5.00 at digikey.ca.

    Just my 2c.

  16. @matty: Holy defensive stance Batman! Did you see me complain about the post? I didn’t, in case that slipped by you. It was a simple question that was prompted by the comment that was posted. And if you take the time to read my post again you might notice that I used some playful language that might perhaps indicate that I wasn’t being quite so serious.

    And no, I haven’t submitted anything, I come to HaD to read about random projects that people work on. I thought that was the purpose of the site, to read about hacks? I wasn’t aware that I was obligated to find content.

  17. Has anyone read the press on the “Eco-earth Nano Fluid XP+ Extreme” coolant used in this project?

    What’s this stuff made of, free-range raised atoms fed with sustainable organic quarks, with a dollar from the sale of each gallon going to the wildlife protection fund?

    I propose a 1-cent “puffery” tax levied against every meaningless adjective and adverb used to over inflate the virtue of any retail product. Betcha we could pay off the national debt with enough left over that all of us could retire to Costa Rica.

  18. Recipe for a thermonuclear weapon:

    1) Fabricate a titanium metal sphere, 10 meters in diameter

    2) Fill with readers of Hackaday

    3) Inject an article about arduinos

    Approximate yield: 100 kilotons

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