Here’s a life protip for you: get really, really good at one video game. Not all of them; you only want to be good – top 10% at least – at one video game. For me, that’s Galaga. It’s a great arcade game, and now it’s IoT. [justin] has been working on publishing high scores from a Galaga board to the Internet. The electronics are actually pretty simple – just a latch on a memory address, and an ESP8266 for comms.
On with the mergers and acquisitions! Lattice has been sold to Canyon Bridge, a Chinese private equity firm, for $1.3 Billion. Readers of Hackaday should know Lattice as the creators of the iCE40 FPGA platform, famously the target of the only Open Source FPGA toolchain.
The Internet of Chocolate Chip Cookies. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter for a cookie machine, because buying a tube of pre-made cookie dough is too hard. There is one quote I would like to point out in this Kickstarter: “Carbon Fiber Convection Heating Element (1300W) is more energy-efficient than traditional electric elements and heats up instantly.” Can someone please explain how a heating element can be more efficient? What does that mean? Aren’t all resistive heating elements 100% efficient by default? Or are they 0% efficient? The Internet of Cookies broke my brain.
The USB Rubber Ducky is a thumb-drive sized device that, when plugged into a computer, presents itself as a USB HID keyboard, opens up a CLI, inputs a few commands, and could potentially do evil stuff. The USB Rubber Ducky costs $45, a Raspberry Pi Zero and a USB connector costs $6. [tim] built his own USB Rubber Ducky, and the results are great.
Doesn’t some energy in resistive elements get “wasted” as light? Maybe (highly doubtful) they’ve found a way to avoid this.
It could be more efficient “as compared to a conventional oven” and just be a poorly written description.
Their cooker would seem to present a small, highly insulated chamber.
An oven, big enough to cook a turkey and vented (mine is) might be less efficient in comparison.
(Then again, some Kickstarters make crazy claims.)
In a closed chamber the light will hit the walls and end up as heat anyway. EVERYTHING ends up as low-grade heat, it’s a law of the Universe. And the quote specifically mentions the carbon fibre element being more efficient than traditional ones. Sounds like nonsense to me.
Same thing bothers me when someone talks about an electric heater being cheap to run. There’s no such thing as efficiency for heaters! Well, except heat pumps, that manage about 400%.
People here who are renting a unit with electric heat be like “I don’t get it, I turn all the lights off when I walk out of the room, unplugged all the wall warts, cooking only quick meals, no watching so much TV, not spending so long on the computer, just reading by a nightlight, and STILL my electric bill is 400 a month in winter…..”
I tell ’em, leave everything on, enjoy yourself, unless you’re gonna run a 2 kilowatt pirate radio station there’s almost nothing you can do that will be much less efficient at making heat than the baseboard heaters.
In theory, lower heat capacity could mean less wasted heat after cooking is done, right?
And possibly quicker heating to the desired temperature.
Even most incandescent light bulbs are like 99% efficient as heaters :D
Incandescent light bulbs have very poor efficiency but still, more energy is wasted in the transmission lines and that is how the 1% figure is arrived at. (From memory)
Just skip the heating process all together and eat the “cookie” dough ;-)
https://youtu.be/TGTYgRh-PI8
Lol. Exactly the first thing that came to my mind.
That cookie oven is huge!
I still preferred my smaller design.
https://hackaday.io/project/2409-microven
You totally need convection though or the bottoms turn out dark.
Yours is a nice idea, but I think making it out of plastic is your major problem.
Yeah, i actually moved to ceramics and PTC heating elements to resolve the plastics and thermal issues.
Lump of wood, fit standard bulb base to it, wire it, insert 40W lightbulb, find can that fits over 40W bulb, make clips to hold it to base over bulb, Find a larger can that covers first can without touching and stands about an inch or 2.5 cm higher than the base of the other can. Put some standoffs and clips on the bottom of that to hold it in place. Now, clean bottom of 1st can, place cookie, cover with 2nd can, turn on… wait until co-workers driven insane by cookie smell… remove burned cookie and subtract 3 mins from timing next time, co-workers are obviously not a reliable timing method.
CHip, it’s an easy bake oven. The cookie comes from individually wrapped tubes [keurig-waste much?] Yeah resistors tend to be ~100% efficient, anything said in marketing are stretched truths for sales, if not out right lies. Fuck them, fuck that.
For me it was the Forza Motorsports series. Damn you, Microsoft. Damn you.