Hacking Together A Sous Vide Cooker

November 6, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 40 Comments

Those amongst you that are cooks won’t need this explanation, for the rest of us, lets just get this out of the way. Sous Vide is when you cook things at a temperature lower than normal, for a period of time longer than normal to attain specific results in texture. A chef can tell you more intricate details about it, but what we care about is how to impress our friends with a cheap hack and a tasty meal. This video shows how to hack your slow cooker for precise temperature control. Well, it really shows how to splice a temperature controller into an extension cord, so we guess it could be used for a ton of things, non Sous Vide related.

[via Lifehacker]

Step By Step Antique Radio Repair And Upgrade

November 6, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

I actually have a 3 very similar radios. I think I need to do this. [M3talhead] takes us through a very informative repair of an old tube radio. In this case, his radio was from the late 30s. He was able to find the original data from Radiomuseum.org. He painstakingly dismantles the radio components and the cabinet. Instead of completely modernizing the internals, he replaces the bad parts and brings it back to functionality. He wanted to do an MP3 upgrade, but rather than wire directly into the radio, he built an AM transmitter for his mp3 player.

Some Weekend Robot Goodness In Link Form

November 6, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

PBS Newshour did a piece on robots. They talked about NASA’s bot pictured above, Asimo, Big Dog, PR2, Robbie the robot and a few others. We didn’t see anything new, but we really do like the coverage getting out there. We also never need an excuse to watch that guy kick big dog around for a while. We know it’ll only be a matter of time before the tables are turned.

Willow Garage, the folks behind PR2, are conducting a survey to see what your favorite robot is. Their list is pretty short, but they did leave a spot for you to add a name. The picture above, is not from willow garage though. This is the picture I got from BotJunkie (we love this site) where I found this story. They didn’t attribute the artist, but I feel they need credit, it is an awesome shirt.

It turns out that it is a t-shirt design available at the chopshopstore. You can see that their eyes are done in glow-in-the-dark material. On a side note, the hackaday store just got glow in the dark material yesterday(as well as a re-design) and will be announcing several new designs in the near future.

I personally inherited several huge boxes full of sci-fi pulp. The robots I’ve seen in these are amazing, ranging from amazingly ridiculous to amazingly awesome. I’ve only just begun scanning in the covers, and plan to post at least one a day. You know what would be awesome though? If I had one of these.