Circular Saws In The Kitchen, Good Idea Or Best Idea?

Kitchen centrifuge using a circular saw

[Mike Warren] was contemplating risky but exciting projects he could do when he came up with this magnificent contraption. A centrifuge made out of an old circular saw!

First question — why? Well if you’re a foody or you enjoy the study of molecular gastronomy, bringing a centrifuge to the kitchen can allow for some more technical dishes. It suddenly becomes possible to separate food based on its density, just like how it works in the lab. Practical applications for super fancy dishes — we’re not too sure — but it involves relatively unsafe power tools and food so we felt obliged to share it!

Let’s start off with the generic warning — in fact, [Mike] states this before the Instructable begins:

Do not replicate this project, it is incredibly dangerous!

The project makes use of an old corded circular saw, a few salad bowls, some threaded rod, a few nuts, some binder clips and some metal plates to hold the plastic test tubes. At 4900RPM (the speed of his saw),he’s calculated his G-Force to be around 1879G’s. Holy cow. A person passes out at around 10Gs, and a bullet fired from a typical handgun is well over 50,000 — on the extreme end of things, a professional lab ultra-centrifuge can hit over 300,000.

These all of course pale by comparison to the Large Hadron Collider, which can accelerate protons at approximately 190,000,000G’s! And to conclude, this is what happens when lab centrifuges blow up. Don’t do it — but do watch the following video and enjoy!

Continue reading “Circular Saws In The Kitchen, Good Idea Or Best Idea?”

Magsafe On An Android, Cats And Dogs Living Together

Mag

We’re thinking most Hackaday readers have at one time or another been tasked with replacing the power connector in a laptop. Anyone who has done so can easily see the genius behind the Apple Magsafe connector. Since the second gen iPhone, there have been rumors Apple will release a cellphone with the Magsafe connector, a great idea, seeing as how cell phones are thrown around even more than laptops. [Tony] got tired of waiting, and had an Android device anyway, so he decided to retrofit a Magsafe power adapter to his Note II.

In the interest of excess, [Tony] is using the absurdly large ZeroLemon 9300mAh battery and case for his device, giving him a lot of room for this hardware mod. A tiny 3D printed adapter fits around a slightly modified Magsafe connector, and with a little bit of super glue and solder, the connector is wired up to the charging port.

Of course the charger isn’t a stock Apple power supply; it’s just another Magsafe plug wired into a 5V wall wart. We’re not going to take a guess at what would happen if [Tony] plugged a stock Apple charger into his modded phone, but the mod works perfectly without the danger of ripping a USB port out of his phone.

Hack A Camera, Win A Nikon

nikonchallenge_620x250_01jbr1

Several juicy prizes from Nikon are ripe for the plucking. Our friends at MAKE are hosting a Nikon sponsored challenge. Grand prize is an Nikon 1 V3 with three extra lenses, and there are two runner-up prizes which offer the same without the extras. They’re basically asking for your best camera hack. Now the submission process is a one-shot deal (no posting and iterating) which may explain why the contest — which started 4/15 and ends 5/13 — only has two entries. Still, we’d love to see a Hackaday reader waltz in and claim the loot.

Need some examples to get you rolling? Connectivity is a fun topic; try interfacing your camera with something like a Nintendo DS. Everyone needs to make at least one motion rig like this Ikea slider. We can’t stop listing examples without at least one shutter trigger. Here’s a sound activated one to capture things that happen extremely quickly.

If you end up winning make sure to tell us so we can share in your delight.