Microwave Ovens: Need More Power? Use Lasers Instead!

September 28, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 15 Comments

You know how it is, you get in late from work, you’ve been stuck in traffic for what seems like an eternity, and you’re hungry. You reach for the microwave meal, and think, if only I didn’t have to wait that three-and-a-half minutes, 900 watts just isn’t enough power. What you need is a laser microwave, and as luck would have it, [Styropyro] has built one, so you don’t have to. No, really, don’t.

After he observed a microwave only operating on a half-wave basis, and delivering power 50% of the time, he attempted to convert it to full-wave by doubling up the high voltage transformer and rectification diodes. While this worked, the poor suffering magnetron didn’t go the full mile, and died somewhat prematurely.

Not to be disheartened, the obvious thing was to ditch the whole concept of cooking with boring old radio waves, and just use a pile of frickin’ lasers instead. Now we’re not sure how he manages to get hold of some of the parts he uses, and the laser array modules look sketchy to say the least, and to be frank, we don’t think they should be easy to get given the ridiculous beam power they can muster.

With the build completed to the usual [Styropryo] level of excellent build quality, he goes on to produce some mouthwatering delicacies such as laser-charred poptart, incinerated steak with not-really-caramelised onions and our favourite laser-popcorn. OK, he admits the beam has way too much power, really should be infrared, and way more diffuse to be even vaguely practical, but we don’t care about practicality round these parts. Who wouldn’t want the excitement of going instantly blind by merely walking into the kitchen at the wrong time?

We’ve covered a fair few microwave oven related hacks before, including a neat microwave kiln, and hacks using microwave parts, such as a janky Jacob’s ladder, but this is probably the first laser microwave we’ve come across. Hopefully the last :)

And remember kids, as [Styropyro] says in pretty much every video on his channel:

All the crazy stuff I’m about to do was done for educational purposes, in fact if you were to try any of this stuff at home, you’d probably die…

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One Where Shift Happens

September 28, 2021 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

It’s been an exciting few weeks for me personally on the clacking front. I got a couple of new-to-me keyboards including my first one with ALPS switches, an old TI/99A keyboard with Futaba MD switches, and a couple of what are supposed to be the original Cherry switches (oh man they clack so nicely!) But enough about my keyboard-related fortuitousness, and on to the hacks and clacks!

Putting My Pedals to the Metal

I picked up this Kinesis Savant Elite triple foot pedal from Goodwill. It works fine, but I don’t like the way it’s programmed — left arrow, right arrow, and right mouse click. I found the manual and the driver on the Kinesis website easily enough, but I soon learned that you need a 32-bit computer to program it. Period. See, Kinesis never wrote an updated driver for the original Savant Elite pedal, they just came out with a new one and people had to fork over another $200 or figure something else out.

I’m fresh out of 32-bit computers, so I tried running the program in XP-compatibility mode like the manual says, but it just doesn’t work. Oh, and the manual says you can brick it if you don’t do things correctly, so that’s pretty weird and scary. It was about this time that I started to realize how easy it would be to open it up and just replace the controller with something much more modern. Once I got inside, I saw that all three switches use JST plugs and right angle header. Then I though hey, why not just re-use this set-up? I might have to make a new board, but it how awesome would it be to plug these pedals’ JSTs into my own board?

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Regular coffee grounds and lab-grown coffee.

Is Lab-Grown Coffee Worth A Hill Of Beans?

September 28, 2021 by Kristina Panos 36 Comments

Historically, coffee has needed two things to grow successfully — a decent altitude and a warm climate. Now, a group of scientists from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have managed to grow coffee in a lab. They started by culturing coffee plant cells, and then planted them in bioreactors full of nutrient-rich growing medium. But they didn’t grow plants. Instead of green beans inside coffee cherries, the result is a whitish powdered biomass that resembles pure caffeine. Then the scientists roasted the powder as you would beans, and report that it smells and tastes just like regular coffee.

There are plenty of problems percolating with the coffee industry that make this an attractive alternative — mostly worker exploitation, unsustainable farming methods, and land rights issues. And the Bean Belt, which stretches from Ethiopia to South America to Southeast Asia is getting too hot. On top of all that, coffee production is driving deforestation in Vietnam and elsewhere, although coffee could help the forests regenerate more quickly.

Coffee purists shouldn’t be dismayed, because variety is still possible using varying cell cultures to dial in the caffeine level and the flavors. We’ll drink to that.

Another thing in the industry that’s a real grind is coffee cupping, but spectroscopy could soon help determine bean quality.

Gopher, The Competing Standard To WWW In The ’90s Is Still Worth Checking Out

September 28, 2021 by Chris Wilkinson 78 Comments

The 30^th anniversary of the World Wide Web passed earlier this year. Naturally, this milestone was met with truckloads of nerdy fanfare and pining for those simpler times. In three decades, the Web has evolved from a promising niche experiment to being an irreplaceable component of global discourse. For all its many faults, the Web has become all but essential for billions around the world, and isn’t going anywhere soon.

As the mainstream media lauded the immense success for the Web, another Internet information system also celebrated thirty years – Gopher. A forgotten heavyweight of the early Internet, the popularity of Gopher plummeted during the late 90s, and nearly disappeared entirely. Thankfully, like its plucky namesake, Gopher continued to tunnel across the Internet well into the 21^st century, supported by a passionate community and with an increasing number of servers coming online.

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Erasable Pen Ink Adds Colors To 3D Prints

September 28, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

Changing colors during a 3D print is notoriously difficult. Either you need multiple heads ready to go during the print which increases operating and maintenance costs for your printer, or you need to stop the print to switch the filament and then hope that everything matches up when the print is resumed. There are some workarounds to this problem, but not many of them are as smooth an effortless as this one which uses erasable pen ink to add colors to the filament on the fly.

Erasable pen ink is a thermochromic material that doesn’t get removed from paper when erased like graphite from a pencil. Instead the heat from the friction of erasing causes it to become transparent. By using this property for a 3D print, the colors in the print can be manipulated simply by changing the temperature of the hot end. Of course the team at [Autodrop3d] had quite a learning curve when experimenting with this method, as they had to run the extruder at a much lower temperature than normal to have control over the ink’s color, had to run the print much slower than normal, and were using a very sticky low-temperature plastic for the print.

With all of these modifications to the print setup, there are bound to be some limitations in material and speed, but the results of the project speak for themselves. This allows for stock 3D printers to use this method with no hardware modifications, and the color changes can be done entirely in software. While everyone catches up with this new technology, there are some other benefits to a 3D printer with multiple print heads, though, and some clever ways of doing the switching without too much interruption.

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NASA Is Looking For A Next-Gen Astronaut Van

September 28, 2021 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

Since the Apollo program, astronauts making the nine mile trip from the Operations and Checkout Building to the launch pad have rode in a specialized van that’s become lovingly referred to as the Astrovan. The original van, technically a modified motorhome, was used from 1967 all the way to the first Shuttle missions in 1983. From then on, a silver Airstream Excella emblazoned with the NASA “meatball” carried crews up until the final Shuttle rolled to a stop in 2011.

With crewed flights for the Artemis lunar program on the horizon, NASA has put out a call to companies that want to build a new Crew Transportation Vehicle (CTV). As you might expect from rocket scientists, the space agency has provided an exacting list of specifications for the new CTV, down to the dimensions of the doors and how many amps each of its 12 VDC power jacks must be able to handle. Perhaps most notably, NASA requires that the new 8-seat Astrovan be a zero-emission vehicle; which given the relatively short distance it has to drive, shouldn’t actually be too difficult.

In the document, NASA explains that the new CTV could either be a completely new one-of-a-kind vehicle, or a commercially available vehicle that has been suitably modified, as was the case with the previous vans. But interestingly, it also says they’re open to proposals for refurbishing the Shuttle-era 1983 Airstream and putting it back into service.

This is particularly surprising, as the vehicle is currently part of the Atlantis exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center. Presumably the space agency thinks there would be some bankable nostalgia should Artemis crews ride to the pad in the same van that once carried the Shuttle astronauts, but given the vehicle’s history and the fact that it’s literally a museum piece, it seems somewhat inappropriate. This is after all the very same van that once carried the Challenger and Columbia crews to their ill-fated spacecraft. Luckily, the chances of anyone willing to turn a 1983 Airstream into a zero-emission vehicle seem pretty slim.

If you’re wondering, SpaceX carries astronauts to the pad in specially modified Tesla Model X luxury SUVs, and Boeing has already partnered with Airstream to build their own Astrovan II. There’s still no date on when Boeing might actually get their CST-100 Starliner up to the International Space Station, but at least the van is ready to go.

Put A Landscape Scanner On Your Bike And Ride

September 27, 2021 by Lewin Day 33 Comments

Google have a fleet of cars travelling the roads of the world taking images for their online StreetView service. You could do much the same thing pedalling on two wheels, with the help of this landscape scanner from [Celian_31].

The basic concept is simple. A powerbank on the bike runs a Raspberry Pi, kitted out with its typical Pi Camera within a 3D-printed housing. A reed switch on the bike’s frame detects pulses from a magnet attached to the valve stem of one tire, and this is used to trigger the taking of photos at regular intervals with the aid of a Python script. Further scripts are then used to knit all the photos taken on a ride together into one contiguous image.

It’s unlikely you’ll recreate Google’s entire StreetView in this fashion. You’d probably want a spherical camera anyway. However, if you wish to undertake regular static surveillance of your local area in an inconspicuous fashion, this would be a great way to do it while also staying in shape. If you do that, please don’t tell us as it would be a major violation of operational security. We’d love to hear about any other projects, though! Video after the break.

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