Day: December 6, 2017

Casein, Cello, Carrotinet, And Copper Oxide, Science Grab Bag

December 6, 2017 by 3 Comments

One of our favorite turnips, oops, citizen scientists [The Thought Emporium], has released his second Grab Bag video which can also be seen after the break. [The Thought Emporium] dips into a lot of different disciplines as most of us are prone to do. Maybe one of his passions will get your creative juices flowing and inspire your next project. Or maybe it will convince some clever folks to take better notes so they can share with the rest of the world.

Have you ever read a recipe and thought, “What if I did the complete opposite?” In chemistry lab books that’s frowned upon but it worked for the Reverse Crystal Garden. Casein proteins make cheese, glue, paint, and more so [The Thought Emporium] gave us a great resource for making our own and demonstrated a flexible conductive gel made from that resource. Since high school, [The Thought Emporium] has learned considerably more about acoustics and style as evidence by his updated cello. Maybe pulling old projects out of the closet and giving them the benefit of experience could revitalize some of our forgotten endeavors.

If any of these subjects whet your whistle, consider growing gorgeous metal crystals, mixing up some conductive paint or learning the magnetic cello. Remember to keep your lab journal tidy and share on Hackday.io.

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When Is A 10-bit A/D An 8-bit A/D?

December 6, 2017 by 25 Comments

Marketing guys love bigger numbers. Bigger is better, right? After all, Subway called it a “footlong” not an 11-incher. So when it comes to analog to digital (A/D) conversion, more bits are better, right? Well, that depends. It is easy to understand that an A/D will have a low and high measurement and the low will be zero counts and the high will result in the maximum count for the number of bits. That is, an 8-bit device will top out at 255, a 10-bit at 1023, and so on.

The question is: are those bits meaningful? The answer depends on a few factors. Like most components we deal with, our ideal model isn’t reality, but maybe it is close enough.

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Woman Gets Diabetes, Builds Own Pancreas

December 6, 2017 by 64 Comments

For the most part, when we break out the soldering iron to make a project for ourselves – we do so for fun. Sometimes we do so for necessity. Rarely do we, however, do so to save our own lives.  [Dana Lewis] is one of the 30 million people in the US who suffer from diabetes. It’s a condition where the pancreas fails to make insulin, resulting in a buildup of sugar in the bloodstream. Managing the levels of insulin and sugar in their bodies is a day-to-day struggle for the millions of diabetics in the world. It’s a great deal more for [Dana], however. She sleeps with machines that monitor the glucose levels in her blood, but lives with constant worry.

“I was afraid at night because I am a super-deep, champion sleeper,” Lewis said, “I sleep through the alarms on the device that are supposed to wake me up and save my life…”

What she needed was the glucose data from the device and use it to trigger a louder alarm. It wasn’t long until she found someone who had done just this. Using a Raspberry Pi, she was able to capture the data and then alarm her via her phone. She then setup a web interface so others could see her data and call her if she didn’t wake.

The next step is obvious. Why not make the state of the insulin pump a function of the data? And thus, a sort of artificial pancreas.

The project is open source for anyone to use and improve upon. She was placed on a list for the 100 most creative people in the US for 2017. We’re not strangers to the idea of an artificial pancreas, but it’s always great to see people using things we make video game consoles out of to save lives.

Thanks to [Dave Zzzz] for the tip!

Bear McCreary's floppy music for Revolt

Floppy Drive Music By Emmy Winning Composer

December 6, 2017 by 25 Comments

We’ve featured a lot of awesome music made using floppy drives before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used as the main instrument in a movie score, and by Emmy winning composer [Bear McCreary]. The movie, in this case is alien invasion film, Revolt, but you’ve surely heard Bear’s amazing work in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (my favorite of his), or the one for which he won an Emmy, Da Vinci’s Demons wherein the main theme sounds the same backwards as forwards, to name just a few. So when someone of [Bear]’s abilities makes use of floppy drives, we listen.

[Bear] works with a team, and what they learned was that it’s a clicking sound which the drives make that we hear. It’s just so fast that it doesn’t come across as clicks. The speed at which the clicks are made determines the pitch. And so to control the sound, they control the floppy drives’ speed. They also found that older floppy drives had more of the type of sound they were looking for than newer ones, as if floppy drives weren’t getting hard to find as is. In the end, their floppy orchestra came out to around twelve drives. And the result is awesome, so be sure to check it out in the video below.

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