Chocolate as rocket fuel

Candybar-Milkyway-Rocket-Engine

[Adric Menning] has an unfortunate allergy. He's allergic to chocolate. Instead of eating the stuff, he's using it to build model rocket engines. The project stems from the Quelab Hackerspace's chocolate hacking challenge which spawned a number of interesting hacks. [Adric's] doesn't use pure chocolate (an experiment with a Hershey's bar was a bust) but manages to ignite using a Milky Way … [Read more...]

Wedding gift fail has happy couple cursing your name

wedding-gift-fail

[Superluminal] received an invite to his friend's wedding. He got together with some mutual acquaintances to take up a collection as a wedding gift. But as things go, a suitable present couldn't be found. The pooled money itself ended up being the gift, but apparently a greeting card with a money pocket inside of it wasn't good enough. The group decided to encase the coinage in a block of sugar … [Read more...]

Cotton candy just the color you like it

cotton-candy-machine

Hit the web to order up your custom-color cotton candy from this machineĀ (translated). A computer monitors a web interface for an incoming order, then pushes commands to an mbed microcontroller which dispenses three different colors of sugar to whip up your custom shade of the cottony delight. In addition to the sugar dispensing system, the candy maker itself is also a do-it-yourself design. … [Read more...]

Homemade solid propellant rocket motors

model-rocket-motor

[KoD] and [Navic] are building solid propellant motors using sugar and potassium nitrate. They cook up the two ingredients along with water and a bonding agent. They find that corn syrup is particularly good for bonding and that cooking the strange brew is more of an artform than science. Either way, the video after the break is proof of the dangers involved in this hobby. Testing the engine … [Read more...]

Open3DP looks at 3D printing in common materials

3d-glass-printing

[Buddy Smith] sent us a link to Open3DP which he calls "REAL 3d printing hacks". Open3DP showcases the projects of the Solheim Rapid Prototyping Laboratory at the University of Washington. They're working on 3D printing in materials that can be commonly acquired and to that end they publish recipes for powder printing in materials such as sugar, ceramic, and glass. Take a look through their … [Read more...]

Rapid prototyping with sugar and lasers

IMG_2309 (Custom)

After the recent announcement of the re-release of the candyfab, [4volt] had to give a run at melting sugar with a laser. It turns out that a 40w co2 laser works great. They don't currently have a method of layering, so everything is one layer currently.You can see the results of different speeds and power ratings on the site. The next party they throw will have some pretty fancy tasty treats. … [Read more...]

OLPC dual booting

Gizmodo has the first ever footage of an OLPC dual-booting both its default OS, Sugar Linux, and Windows XP. The BIOS was not originally intended to boot XP, so it had to be modified for this to work. The XO's screen flipper and directional buttons work in XP as well. It's not all good news, though: XOs are designed to be ultra-lean, packing a meager 256MB of RAM, which is hardly ideal to run XP. … [Read more...]