Hackaday Links: June 29, 2014

June 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Ever see a really cool build on YouTube with no build details at all? Frustrating, right? That’s us with the NES Keytar covering the Game of Thrones theme. He’s using a Raspi with the sound chip in the NES to do live chiptunes. Freakin’ awesome. There’s also the ST:TNG theme as well.

A few years ago the folks at Oculus had an idea – because of cellphones, small, high resolution displays are really cheap, so why not make VR goggles? At Google IO this week someone figured out everyone already has a cellphone, so just wrap it in some cardboard and call it a set of VR goggles. You can get a kit here, but the only difficult to source components are the lenses.

What happens when you put liquid nitrogen under a vacuum? Well, it should evaporate more, get colder, and freeze. Then it breaks up into solid nitrogen snow. No idea what you would do with this, but there ‘ya go. Oh, [NC], we’re going to need a writeup of that LN2 generator.

About a month ago, the House4Hack hackerspace in South Africa told us of their plans to bring a glider down from 20km above the Earth. They finally launched it, The CAA only allowed them to glide back from 6km (20,000 feet), but even from there the foam glider hit 230kph (124 knots). That’s a little impressive for a foam FPV platform, and we’re betting something with a larger wingspan would probably break a spar or something. Shout out to HABEX.

All the electronic dice projects we’ve seen have one thing in common: they’re not cubes. Thus uberdice. It’s six nine-pixel displays on the faces of a cube, powered by a battery, and controlled by an accelerometer. Yes, it is by far the most complicated die ever made, but it does look cool.

Homemade Liquid Nitrogen

May 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

As far as DIY cryogenics are concerned, dry ice is easy mode. You can get frozen carbon dioxide at WalMart, or from a nozzle that screws onto a CO2 tank. It’s all very ordinary, and not really special at all. Want to know what’s cool? Making liquid nitrogen at home.

[imsmooth] is getting his nitrogen from a standard tank, sending the gas through a CO2 and H2O scrubber, compressing it, putting the compressed gas in an ice bath, and slowly diffusing the compressed, cooled gas into a vacuum reservoir. When the cold compressed gas is released into the reservoir, Boyle’s law happens and liquid nitrogen condenses in a flask.

As far as materials and equipment are concerned, [imsmooth] is using a PVC tower filled with zeolite to filter out the CO2 and H2O, a SCUBA compressor (no oil), and an almost absurd amount of stainless steel tubing for the precooler and regenerative cooling tower. Except for a few expensive valves, dewar, and the SCUBA compressor, it’s all stuff you could easily scrounge up from the usual home improvement stores.

[imsmooth] is producing about 350cc/hr of liquid nitrogen, or more than enough for anyone who isn’t running an industrial process in their garage. Check out the video of the build below.

Continue reading “Homemade Liquid Nitrogen” →

Recycling Plastic With Liquid Nitrogen

March 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Ln2

Recycling 3D printer filament isn’t a new idea, and in fact there are quite a few devices out there that will take chunks ABS, PLA, or just about any other thermoplastic and turn them into printer filament. The problem comes when someone mentions recycling plastic parts and turning them into filament ready to be used again. Plastics can only be recycled so many times, and there’s also the problem of grinding up your octopodes and companion cubes into something a filament extruder will accept.

The solution, it appears, is to freeze the plastic parts to be recycled before grinding them up. Chopping up plastic parts at room temperature imparts a lot of energy into the plastic before breaking. Freezing the parts to below their brittle transition temperature means the resulting chips will have clean cuts, something much more amenable to the mechanics of filament extruders.

The setup for this experiment consisted of cooling PLA plastic with liquid nitrogen and putting the frozen parts in a cheap, As Seen On TV blender. The resulting chips were smaller than the plastic pellets found in injection molding manufacturing plants, but will feed into the extruder well enough.

Liquid nitrogen might be overkill in this case; the goal is to cool the plastic down below its brittle transition temperature, which for most plastics is about -40° (420° R). Dry ice will do the job just as well, and is also available at most Walmarts.

Liquid Nitrogen (finally) Makes An Arduino Project Cool

August 18, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 41 Comments

At $1.5 a liter in Moscow, [Michail] couldn’t resist buying some liquid nitrogen for himself. He thought that because Arduinos were quite popular among geeks, he’d try to overclock one while bringing its temperature down to -196°C/-320°F.

To check the ATmega was still working correctly, [Michail] designed several stability tests: SRAM read/write, flash read, arithmetic math and program flow tests (code with some conditionals). He used a standard HD44780 LCD to view the tests results but also an LED, blinking the number of the test it would have failed. The Arduino was externally clocked by a TTL-logic based square signal generator he designed, which can produce a clock between 16 and 100MHz. It turns out that you can run an Arduino at 65.3MHz when it is cooled with liquid nitrogen!

[Michail]’s article also explains what happens to the different on-board components when cooled with LN2: electrolytic capacitors becomes virtually non-existent, X7R capacitors’ impedance drop by 2/3, silicon diodes voltage drop increase by 50% and LED’s colors change. Check out the video below:

Continue reading “Liquid Nitrogen (finally) Makes An Arduino Project Cool” →

Dropping The Nitrogen Bomb In Science Class

September 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

We took Geology in college. It was pretty cool learning about the hardness of different minerals. But there were no explosions involved. We’re not entirely sure what this class is, perhaps Chemistry, maybe Physics, but we want in. [Dr. Roy Lowry] wows the class with a bomb made of liquid nitrogen. The demonstration was part of his lecture at Plymouth University.

A small explosion is cool, but [Roy] knows how to add the wow factor. To make the bomb he filled a one liter plastic bottle about 1/3 of the way with liquid nitrogen. After tightly sealing the cap it was dropped in that garbage can which had a pool of warm water in it. Before quickly running away he and his assistant dumped a few garbage bags of ping-pong balls on top of it all. When the plastic bottle bursts under the pressure of the expanding gas it sends the garbage can about six feet into the air and floods the room with bouncing white balls. See the whole presentation for yourself in the clip after the break and don’t forget the sound so you can catch the oohs and aahs at the end.

Looks like a Hackerspace recruitment tool if we’ve ever seen one.

Continue reading “Dropping The Nitrogen Bomb In Science Class” →

Measuring How Components React To Extremely Cold Temperatures

July 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Shahriar Shahramian] is playing with some liquid nitrogen in order to see how various components react to extremely low temperatures. After the break you will find forty-one minutes of video in which he conducts and explains each experiment. This does have practical applications. If you’re designing hardware for use in space you definitely need to know how the hardware will be affected. We’ve actually seen test rigs built for this very purpose.

During the presentation he doesn’t water down the concepts observed, including the equations governing each reaction to temperature change. If you’re in the mood for a little bit lighter faire you should check out some of the liquid nitrogen cooking hacks like this super-cold cocktail pops project.

Continue reading “Measuring How Components React To Extremely Cold Temperatures” →

Hot Enough For Ya? Super-cold Cocktail-pops Will Help

June 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

The staff of Instructables know how to cut loose and cool off in this already-too-hot summer. They’re making their own popsicles out of cocktails. If only everyone were lucky enough to have employers who endorse these kinds of projects at work.

So the problem here is the the freezing point of liquor. Your margarita, daiquiri, strawberry with champagne, white russian and other favorites just aren’t ever going to solidify in a run-of-the-mill freezer because zero degrees Fahrenheit just won’t cut it. So the big guns were brought to bear. The cocktail-pops were lined up in a container and dowsed with liquid nitrogen.

The substance boils off at around -321 F, more than cold enough to quickly freeze these alcoholic goodies. But use caution. After they’ve been frozen you need to throw them in the freezer to warm them up. The first guinea pigs burned their tongues when trying to lick the pops too soon.

Don’t want to buy your liquid nitrogen? Why not just make your own?