Building A Recirculating Infusion Mash System For Your Brewing Pleasure

If you’re into all-grain brewing a little automation goes a long way. [Tom Hargrave] had his eye on a Recirculating Infusion Mash System (RIMS) but the price tag kept him from pulling the trigger. Recently he bit the bullet and built his own small and inexpensive RIMS for use with the 10 gallon cooler he uses as a mash tun.

Mashing is the part of brewing process that collects sugars from the milled grains. Water needs to move through the grain mash and should be kept within a narrow temperature window. This RIMS hardware does that automatically by combining a pump, the heating element from an electric water heater, and a temperature sensor. The wooden disc fits on the top of the mash tun and tubing lets the pump move the liquids as needed. The one thing missing from this build is the PID controller to automate the process. After the break we’ve embedded a video from a separate project that shows off how the PID control would work with a system like this one.

If you’re into automated home brewing you’ll also like this mini-batch brewing setup.

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VISUALIST – A Hardware Visual Effects Synthesizer

[Berto] wrote in to tell us about the visual effects synthesizer he built. It works as a pass-through for a video signal, rendering crisp clean images into a more psychedelic flavor like the one seen above. On the one hand this does a dishonor to the high-quality video devices we carry around in our pockets these days. On the other hand it will make some really interesting background video at a party or at your local dance club.

This is not a filter for a PC, or an FPGA-based processing system. A set of analog parts alter the incoming composite video (NTSC or PAL formats) and pipes the result to a television or projector. [Berto] included controls to alter the effects. They’re mounted on a panel and everything is given a home inside of a handy carrying case. Check out the video clip after the break to get a better idea of the video manipulations this things can pull off.

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4″ Seven Segment Displays Make A Fine Scoreboard

[Blark] took a few parts and turned them into a simple scoreboard. The centerpiece of the build is a set of 4″ seven-segment displays. With those in hand it was just a matter of choosing a controller to feed them data, and developing a user interface.

He seems to have had some issues as he mentions having blown up two PIC chips while soldering. He transitioned to an ATtiny24 chip and everything seems to work quite well now. The user interface depends on two buttons, each increments the score for one half of the display and pushing both at once zeros the game score. The displays use shift registers to store data so they’re quite easy to control with AVR chips. Check out the demo video after the break.

The only problem here is that someone needs to be on the sidelines to increment the score. We’ve seen some more intricate designs that let you use a remote control or even a smart phone.

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Building A Turing Machine From Magic The Gathering

If you really know your Magic the Gather and you’re a programming wiz you’ll appreciate this paper on building a functioning Turing Machine from Magic the Gathering cards. We’re sure you’re familiar with Turing Machines, which uses a rewritable strip to store and recall data. Most of the time we see these machines built as… machines. For instance, this dry-erase marker Turing Machine has long been on the top of our favorites list. But as The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson illustrates, there’s more than one way to skin this cat.

A complete list of the cards used in this machine can be found here. A little bit of preparation (casting to tweak abilities) goes into making sure the cards will work as called for in the Turing design. The tape is made of Ally tokens to the right of the head, and Zombie tokens to the left. The computational abilities of the head depend on the colors of the cards. It’s a bit too complex to paraphrase, but the design is based on this 2-state, 3-symbol setup whose rules are listed in the image above.

It’s going to take us a while to fully wrap our heads around this thing, but it’ll be fun getting to that point!

[via Slashdot]

STM32 F3 Discovery Dev Board Includes Some Extras

ST Microelectronics keeps kicking out development boards to show off their new ARM processor line. Yesterday they issued a press release announcing the STM32 F3 Discovery Board. As their naming scheme implies, this carries an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, but compared to the F0 Discovery board (which we loved) it’s got several extra goodies built into it.

We took a look at the F3 Discovery product page and it doesn’t look like you can order these quite yet. But click-through to the pricing and you’ll see they’ve set it at $10.90. Digikey lists the board at that price point, Mouser lists it at about $16, but neither supplier has any available. We also didn’t see a link for free boards like when the F0 model was released. If you do come across a giveaway link please tip us off about it.

Okay, now let’s discuss those extras. We think this dev kit could be used as an IMU for applications like a quadcopter or a self-balancing robot. That’s because it has a gyroscope and an accelerometer. It’s also got ten LEDs, eight of which are arranged on that white circle. We’d guess that layout is for displaying orientation data from the IMU sensors. There’s also a second USB port to use when developing USB applications for the chip.

Like the other boards in the Discovery family this has the STlinkV2 built-in to use as a programmer. We don’t know if OpenOCD has support for the F3 chipset yet, which is what we’ve been using to program STM chips in a Linux environment.

[Quinn] Resurrects An Amplifier That Experienced Death-by-capacitor

[Quinn Dunki] is adding wireless audio to all of the rooms in her home. She’s going with Airplay, snatching up used or refurbished Airport Express units because of their ability to work with both her existing WiFi and the Airplay protocol. The last piece in the puzzle is to get an Amp and she chose the small unit seen above. The problem is that it was dead on arrival and she couldn’t get the company to respond to her issue. So she cracked it open and fixed it right up.

The offenders are the three electrolytic capacitors at the top of the picture. She took some close-up images of each and you can’t miss the fact that they’re blown out. These are often among the higher price-per-unit parts and manufactures try to pinch the penny as much as possible. Add to it the heat in a small enclosure like this one and you’ve got a failure. [Quinn] dug through her junk bin but the size of the replacement had to be a perfect match so she ended up putting in a parts order. The new caps fit and work perfectly as you can hear in the clip after the break.

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64 Rasberry Pis Turned Into A Supercomputer

In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before someone turned a bunch of Raspberry Pis into a supercomputer.

The Raspi supercomputer is the result of a project headed up by University of Southampton professor [Simon Cox]. Included in the team are a gaggle of grad students and [Simon]’s 6-year-old son who graciously provided the material, design, and logistics for the custom LEGO case.

The Iridris-Pi supercomputer, as the team calls their creation, consists of 64 Raspberry Pis, all configured for parallel processing using a lightweight version of MPI. [Simon] was kind enough to put up an excellent guide for turning two (or more) Raspberry Pis into a supercomputer.

The machine has a full 1 TB of disk space provided by a 16 GB SD card in each node. Although the press release doesn’t go over the computational capabilities of the Iridris-Pi, the entire system can be powered from a single 13 A supply.

If you’re wondering what it would take to get a Raspberry Pi supercomputer into the TOP500 list of supercomputers, a bit of back-of-the-envelope computation given the Raspi’s performance and the fact the 500th fastest computer can crank out about 60 TeraFLOPS/s, we’ll estimate about 1.4 Million Raspis would be needed. At least it’s a start.