Members of the Rabbit Hole hackerspace spent the last weekend competing in The Deconstruction, a 48 hour hackathon competition. The hackerspace’s theme was “Light it up!”, so members created some awesome projects involving light. The star of the show was their bacon cooking machine. The Rabbit hole made the “Push Button. Receive Bacon” meme real.
A broken laser printer was gutted for its drive train and fuser assembly. Laser printer fusers are essentially hot rollers. The rollers melt toner and fuse it with paper as it passes through the printer. The heat in this case comes from a lamp inside the roller. That lamp also puts out plenty of light, which fit perfectly with the team’s theme.
The Rabbit Hole members wasn’t done though, they also built a pocket-sized infinity mirror from an empty Altoids tin. The bottom of the tin was cut out, and a mirror glued in. A filter from a broken projector made a perfect half silver mirror, and some LEDs completed the project.
The members also built a fandom art piece, consisting of 25 fans connected together in a skull shape. The eye and nose fans were lighted. When the fans were plugged in, they kicked for a few seconds before spinning up. Once they did spin though – there was a mighty wind in the Rabbit Hole.
Click past the break for The Rabbit Hole’s Deconstruction video!
mmm bacon.
I wonder how many laser printers our school actually needs…
The real question is how many bacon machines does your school need?
All of them.
Out of bacon. Insert bacon into tray 1.
I’m sorry I missed it, I was too busy “deconstructing” the kitchen faucet and installing its replacement on Friday evening. A good part of Saturday was spent fixing a pinhole leak that was discovered under same sink (including two trips to the hardware store) and fixing the ice maker in the fridge. (Not that we need the ice in this weather, but it is on the same water lines.)
OMG; i love you. I competed in the deconstruction with a team of my high school students, but the whole time I was thinking about the stuff in my kids’ room that i needed to get to, and my back yard, and under one of my cars, as well as my electric kart project which seems to have one fail after another.
Contest was fun though.
There was a less than satisfying amount of bacon-related build info in that video.
I skipped like 6 times and closed the tab… nothing in there.
+1. I really don’t understand the pre-occupation with video as means of communication – sequential access at a pre-determined speed sucks. Sure, it has a place – such as with the Fourier transform mechanical engine – but it is a really poor medium for the less dynamic stuff. And presumably it also takes longer to produce than words + photos/gifs? Weird.
Sweet youtube meme money, man.
Great observation. The other annoyance is that one cannot watch them silently as they can read an article.
AGREED! The thing is, and if you’re around a lot of teens and college kids you’ll notice this – watching people speak is their most favored method of communicating online. Whereas guys like us prefer to read documentation with pictures, these kids really think video is the best way to communicate.
Now I’ll agree on video you can communicate subtleties that are hard to capture in written documentation, but I agree with you that video is just too slow a way to get information in.
For the record, The Deconstruction required a video reveal as its last component, so that’s what you’re seeing on the hackaday website.
In defense of The Rabbit Hole, their work is largely audio/video/music/graphic arts, their physical space is limited, as well as the time they are available to open their basement to the “public”.
Teams were limited to 3 minute videos by the contest long version is getting edited now.
What Wire said – the current video that’s uploading is 2hours (!) long.
Here’s the feature length coverage of the weekend: http://youtu.be/AIpcnsL8Mo4?list=UURPYVNQU7tbh0gskbRvH9MA
Does anyone know what fuser rollers are made of? Some google says they are often coated with PFA, but PFA is translucent apparently. Why are fusers brownish?
In that thin of an application it is likely clear PFA laminated onto something brown. Highly unlikely that it is a thin sheet of PFA and nothing more.
To me it always seemed to be a red-brown silicone-rubber.
Ah the deconstuction was such fun! And looks like the rabbit hole people had a good time :) For those with a sweet tooth check out my team(Mallowable Anarchy)’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-le8Sbd1w
You guys had a pretty awesome project – I particularly liked the spinning tin of death and fire!
Gee, I don’t know about using a laser printer to “cook: raw bacon, sounds like a good combo of food poisoning with regular poisoning. Why not just get an old hand dryer, some bacon bits and this…
http://hackaday.com/2014/10/14/diy-auto-fish-feeder-feeds-fish-automatically/
Push button, receive bacon indeed.
We did consider adding a paper shredder at the end of the thing for bacon bits haha :)
you just need a sign like ‘not drinking water’, e.g. ‘not eating bacon’
if you are only using bacon for food then you are missing out
A sign saying NOT to eat bacon!? Useless as tits on a bull, I mean ITS BACON!
Awesome! Please continue work on this, maybe you need multiple rollers to fully cook it, and I like the idea of edible toner to print messages ….then it will go perfectly with this pancake machine http://uncrate.com/assets_c/2009/08/chefstack-cropped-thumb-960×640-6289.jpg
I wonder if the roller gets heated enough to kill any organisms. Maybe do an extra pass after the bacon to zap it.
It said it could get up to 350F, but when we probed it, it measured higher than the max of the thermometer which was 450F :p – so yes, probably!