Custom 3D Printed Vitamins Are Just A Few Clicks Away

February 18, 2021 by 39 Comments

It’s recently come to our attention that a company by the name of Nourished has carved out a niche for themselves by offering made-to-order gummy vitamins produced with their own custom designed 3D printers. Customers can either select from an array of pre-configured “stacks”, or dial in their own seven layers of gelatinous goodness for a completely bespoke supplement.

Now we can’t vouch for whether or not taking a custom supplement like this is any better than just popping a traditional multi-vitamin, but we’ll admit the hardware Nourished has developed is pretty interesting. As briefly seen in the video after the break, large syringes are filled with the seven different vitamin suspensions, and then loaded into what appears to be a heated chamber for extrusion. This is not unlike other food-grade 3D printers we’ve seen, such as the Cocoa Press.

It looks like all of the syringes are being depressed simultaneously with a plate and a pair of beefy lead screws, so it seems the order in which the layers are placed down must be different for each nozzle. A blog post on the company’s site from early last year shows a wildly different machine being used to produce the vitamins, so either their core technology is changing rapidly, or perhaps the printer being used depends on whether they’re running off the customized stacks versus the standard formulations.

Interestingly, this is very similar to a concept floated by the U.S. Army’s Combat Feeding Directorate (CFD) back in 2014. They reasoned that a 3D printer could be used to produce meal bars that were customized for each soldier’s personal nutritional needs. Being largely impractical for the battlefield, the program didn’t get very far. But thanks to consumers who are willing to pay the premium that Nourished is charging for this service, it seems the idea has turned into a lucrative business model.

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Internet Of Clams

February 18, 2021 by 21 Comments

Sensors aren’t just limited to the electrical, mechanical, or chemical realm. Up until 1986, canaries were used as Carbon Monoxide detectors, and food tasters are still used by some heads of state. These so-called sentinel species have been known and used for decades if not centuries. But recent projects using clams to detect water pollution are providing real-time electronic feedback. They are using the species Actinonaias ligamentina, which, as you no doubt recall, was declared “Mussel of the Month” by the University of Wisconsin’s MUSSEL Project back in January 2010. They are more commonly known as mucket clams or mucket mussels, and are particularly sensitive to water pollution — they will clam-up, so to speak, in the presence of contaminated water.

Clam Sensor Wiring Mississippi River Project

Several municipalities along the Mississippi River installed clam-based sensors back in 2015, and another system was installed in the Anacostia River Estuary in 2011. Polish director Julia Pekla produced a documentary about the clam-based sensors installed at the Dębiec Water Treatment Plant on the Wisła River near Warsaw which has been in operation since 1994. Her documentary is titled “Gruba Kaśka (Fat Kathy)” and won the In Vivo Award at the 2020 Imagine Science Film’s 13th annual film festival (see trailer below).

As shown in the lead photo, a simple electrical contact is mounted on each clam, which closes a circuit with the base contact when the shell is clamped shut. The systems along the Mississippi River use multiple clams, 11 in Minneapolis Minnesota and 16 in Moline Illinois. The system in Poland uses eight clams — when four or more clams are in agreement the system automatically shuts down and alerts the operators. These clams only work for three months, after which they are put into retirement with a mark so they won’t be required to serve again.

We’ve written about a clam-shaped underwater sensor before, and also reported on the potential of using clams as batteries. This biological sensing technique came to our attention via [Embedded FM podcast #357].

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PS2 Gets Integrated HDMI

February 17, 2021 by 35 Comments

It might be difficult to imagine in our modern HDMI Utopia, but there was a time when game consoles required proprietary cables to connect up to your TV. We’re not just talking about early machines like the NES either, turn of the millennium consoles like the PlayStation 2, Gamecube, and the original Xbox all had weirdo A/V ports on the back that were useless without the proper adapter.

But thanks to the efforts of [Taylor Burley], you can now upgrade your Slim PS2 with integrated HDMI capability. It’s not even a terribly difficult modification, as these things go. Sure there’s a lot of soldering involved to run from the console’s A/V connector to the commercially-made HDMI dongle he’s hidden inside the case, but at least it’s straightforward work.

Tapping into the console’s A/V connector.

As [Taylor] shows in the video after the break, all you have to do is remove the proprietary connector from the HDMI adapter dongle, and wire it directly into the console’s A/V port with a bit of ribbon cable. There are only 8 pins in the connector that you need to worry about, and the spacing is generous enough that there’s no problem getting in there with your iron and some standard jumper wires. You’ve also got to pull 5 V from the board to power the adapter, but that’s easy enough thanks to the system’s nearby USB ports.

There’s a perfect spot to mount the adapter board next to the console’s Ethernet connector, and once that’s tacked down with a bit of adhesive, the only thing left to do is cut a hole in the back of the enclosure for the HDMI port and snip away a bit of the metal RF shield. Presumably the same modification could be done on the original “fat” PS2, though you’ll be on your own for finding a suitable place to mount the board.

While modern game consoles can easily emulate their earlier peers, providing enhanced graphical fidelity and introducing modern conveniences like wireless controllers in the process, there’s still something to be said for playing classic games on the original hardware. Even if these projects are fueled by little more than youthful nostalgia, it’s a safe bet we’ll continue to see folks keeping these older machines running far into the future.

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DIY Bread Slice Paper Goes Against The Grain

February 17, 2021 by 14 Comments

It’s the dead of winter here in the northern hemisphere, and between the pandemic and the polar vortex, we’re getting pretty tired of staring at the same four walls and eating incessantly. It’s the perfect recipe for trying something new and low-calorie, like baking a loaf of bread-shaped note paper from the stuff in the recycling bin.

[SusanLand] likes to make paper out of whatever discarded things she has on hand, including old jeans. When she tried making paper out of nothing but toilet paper tubes, it didn’t work so well, but it gave her an idea for cooking up some offbeat stationery.  She beefed up the pulp with shredded office paper and corn starch, and dialed in the whole wheat hue with a pinch of yellow and orange paper. Once the pulp was ready, she poured it into bread-shaped molds made from a plastic milk jug.

This tidy introduction to making your own paper covers everything from pulping techniques to drying methods. Once the slices are dry, [SusanLand] embellishes them with a scoring tool, colored pencils, and a handful of seeds to complete the look. Check out that process in the videos after the break.

Don’t want to make paper out of your paper? Use it to weigh your car, or fold up a fleet of airplanes.

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Building Replica Amigas To Preserve Digital Artwork

February 17, 2021 by 41 Comments

A few years back, the Andy Warhol Museum ran into an unusual problem. They wanted to display digital pieces the pop artist created on his Amiga 1000 back in the 1980s, but putting the vintage computers on the floor and letting the public poke around on them wasn’t really an option. So the team at [Iontank] were tasked with creating an interactive display that looked like a real Amiga, but used all modern technology under the hood.

The technical details on the electronics side are unfortunately a bit light, as the page on the [Iontank] site simply says all of the internals were replaced with “solid-state hardware” and an Amiga emulator. To us that sounds like a Raspberry Pi is now filling in for the Amiga’s original motherboard, but that’s just a guess. The page does note that they went through the trouble of making sure the original mouse and keyboard still worked, so it stands to reason a couple microcontrollers are also along for the ride doing translation duty.

Milling the curved display lens.

While we don’t know much about the computers, [Iontank] do provide some interesting insight into developing the faux CRTs sitting atop the non-Amigas. There were some promising rear-projection experiments conducted early on, but in the end, they decided to use a standard LCD behind a milled acrylic lens. This not only made for a perfect fit inside the original monitor enclosures, but gave the screen that convex depth that’s missing on modern flat panels.

The end result looks like the best of both worlds, combining the sharp bright image of an LCD with just a hint of retro distortion. With a scanline generator in the mix, this technique would be a great way to simulate the look of a CRT display in an arcade cabinet, though admittedly being able to mill down an acrylic lens of the appropriate size would be a tough job for most home gamers.

[Thanks to Derek for the tip.]

A 3D Printed Camera Arm For Great 3D Print Timelapses

February 17, 2021 by 17 Comments

If you’re a maker that publishes projects online, you’ll be well across the production values arms race that’s been raging over the past decade. For those in the 3D printing space, this means that you’ll need to be producing slick timelapse videos of your prints. [BuildComics] is now doing just that, with a custom camera arm to help do the job. (Video, embedded below.)

The arm relies on a 3D-printed gear train that allows a stepper motor to turn it slowly throughout the print’s duration. It’s controlled by an Arduino that receives commands via Firmata. The arm is mounted on top of the printer, holding a webcam above the build plate for a good view. It’s setup via Octolapse to take images as each layer is finished, giving that haunting look of a model materialising on the print bed throughout the duration of the timelapse.

Files are available for those wishing to build their own. The design as used is for the Prusa Mini, but it should be adaptable to other printers without too much trouble. We’ve reported on Octolapse before, with its videos proving to be the gold standard when it comes to the art of the printing time lapse.

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Cosmic Ray Flips Bit, Assists Mario 64 Speedrunner

February 17, 2021 by 66 Comments

We’ve all heard about cosmic rays flipping bits here and there, but by and large, it occurs rarely enough that we don’t worry too much about it on a day-to-day basis. However, it seems just such a ray happened to flip a crucial bit that assisted a speedrunner in the middle of a competition.

The flip happened to [DOTA_Teabag], who suddenly found Mario flying upward to a higher part of a level, completely unexpectedly. Testing by [pannenkoek12] seems to indicate that this may have been due to a single-bit change to Mario’s height value, from C5837800 to C4837800, leading to the plucky Italian plumber warping upwards through the level. The leading theory is that this bit flip was caused by a cosmic ray event, though the likelihood of such an event is exceedingly rare.

It’s possible that there remains another cause for the flip, though after much work from the community replicating the situation in emulation, none has been found. Other suggestions involve electrical noise or other malfunctions causing the flip, though one would rarely expect such an occurrence to change just one bit of RAM. For now, the jury remains out, but who knows – maybe in the future we’ll find out it was a hidden, undiscovered exploit all along. Of course, if Nintendo doesn’t get you going, try speedrunning Windows 95.  Video after the break.

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