Better Sheet Metal Parts With Chemistry

November 16, 2022 by 7 Comments

[Applied Science] wanted to make some metal parts with a lot of holes. A service provider charged high tooling costs, so he decided to create his own parts using photochemical machining. The process is a lot like creating PC boards, but, of course, there are some differences. You can see the video of the results, below.

Some of the parts could be made in different ways like water jet cutting or even stamping. However, some things — like custom screens — are only really feasible to do with a chemical process like this.

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Pico Does PID

January 13, 2022 by 23 Comments

If you wanted to, say, control a temperature you might think you could just turn on a heater until you reach the desired temperature and then turn the heater off. That sort of works, but it is suboptimal — you’ll tend to overshoot the goal and then as the system cools down, you’ll have to catch up and the result is often a system that oscillates around the desired value but never really settles on the correct temperature. To solve that, you can use a PID — proportional integral derivative — loop and that’s what [veebch] has done with a Rasberry Pi PICO and Micropython.

The idea is to control an output signal based on the amount of difference between the actual temperature and the desired temperature (the proportional error). In addition, the amount is adjusted based on the long term error (integral) and any short term change (the derivative). You can also see a video about using the control loop to make a better sous vide burger, below. Continue reading “Pico Does PID” →

Making Aerogel, It’s Not For The Faint-Hearted

April 3, 2020 by 12 Comments

Aerogel — that mixture of air and silica — is one of those materials that seems like a miracle. It is almost not there since the material is 99% air. [NileRed] wanted to make his own and he documented his work in a recent video you can see below.

If you decide to replicate his result, be careful with the tetramethyl orthosilicate. Here’s what he says about it:

And the best part is, that when it’s in your eyes, it gets under the surface, and the particles are way too small to remove. For this reason, you could go permanently blind.

It can also mess up your lungs, so you probably need a vent hood to really work with this. It isn’t cheap, either. The other things you need are easier to handle: methanol, distilled water, and ammonia.

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Arduino And The Other Kind Of Homebrew

January 26, 2019 by 17 Comments

Usually, when we are talking about homebrew around here, we mean building your own equipment. However, most other people probably mean brewing beer, something that’s become increasingly popular as one goes from microbreweries to home kitchen breweries. People have been making beer for centuries so you can imagine it doesn’t take sophisticated equipment, but a little automation can go a long way to making it easier. When [LeapingLamb] made a batch using only a cooler, a stock pot, and a propane burner, he knew he had to do something better. That’s how Brew|LOGIC was born.

There are many ways to make beer, but Brew|LOGIC focuses on a single vessel process and [LeapingLamb] mentions that the system is akin to a sous vide cooker, keeping the contents of the pot at a specific temperature.

Honestly, though, we think he’s selling himself a bit short. The system has a remote application for control and is well-constructed. This isn’t just a temperature controller thrown into a pot. There’s also a pump for recirculation.

The common stock pot gets some serious modifications to hold the heating element and temperature probe. It also gets some spring-loaded clamps to hold the lid down. Expect to do a lot of drilling.

The electronics uses an Arduino, a Bluetooth board, and some relays (including a solid state relay). The finished system can brew between 5 and 15 gallons of beer at a time. While the system seems pretty good to us, he did list some ideas he has for future expansion, including valves, sensors for water level and specific gravity, and some software changes.

After reading that the system was similar to a sous vide cooker, we wondered if you could use a standard one. Turns out, you can. If you want to make better beer without electronic hacking, there’s always the genetic kind.

Better Beer Through Gene Editing

March 27, 2018 by 63 Comments

As much as today’s American beer drinker seems to like hoppy IPAs and other pale ales, it’s a shame that hops are so expensive to produce and transport. Did you know that it can take 50 pints of water to grow enough hops to produce one pint of craft beer? While hops aren’t critical to beer brewing, they do add essential oils and aromas that turn otherwise flat-tasting beer into delicious suds.

Using UC Berkley’s own simple and affordable CRISPR-CaS9 gene editing system, researchers [Charles Denby] and [Rachel Li] have edited strains of brewer’s yeast to make it taste like hops. These modified strains both ferment the beer and provide the hoppy flavor notes that beer drinkers crave. The notes come from mint and basil genes, which the researchers spliced in to yeast genes along with the CaS9 protein and promoters that help make the edit successful. It was especially challenging because brewer’s yeast has four sets of chromosomes, so they had to do everything four times. Otherwise, the yeast might reject the donor genes.

So, how does it taste? A group of employees from a nearby brewery participated in a blind taste test and agreed that the genetically modified beer tasted even hoppier than the control beer. That’s something to raise a glass to. Call and cab and drive across the break for a quick video.

Have you always wanted to brew your own beer, but don’t know where to start? If you have a sous vide cooker, you’re in luck.

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Moltoduino: Arduinos All The Way Down

February 26, 2018 by 23 Comments

It is getting difficult to find a desktop or laptop computer with only a single CPU. Even a typical ARM-based computer now probably has multiple cores. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from using multiple microcontrollers — like the Arduino — together. To make the process neater, [Dimitris Platis] put together Moltoduino, essentially an Arduino on a shield made to plug into another Arduino. And, yes, they will stack. You can see a video about the open source boards, below.

The key is how the board brings the pins out to connections that are easy to jumper between boards. There are several obvious use cases, but one that [Dimitris] is particularly interested in is hardware-in-the-loop testing. The idea is that you can use a simulated I/O device in one computer to exchange fake data with the software under test.

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Hackaday Links: February 4th, 2018

February 4, 2018 by 14 Comments

Here’s something remarkably displeasant. Can you cook a steak with glue? [Dom] and [Chris] from ExplosiveDischarge have cooked a steak using a huge, huge amount of two-part epoxy. The chemistry behind this is just the exothermic reaction when two-part epoxy kicks off, and yes, the steak (a very thin cut) was sufficiently wrapped and protected from the hot sticky goo. What were the results? An overcooked steak, actually. This isn’t a sous vide setup where the temperature ramps up to 50°C and stays there — the temperature actually hit 80°C at its peak. There are a few ways to fix this, either by getting a thicker cut of steak, adding some bizarre water cooling setup to keep the temperature plateaued at a reasonable temperature.

This is your weekly reminder for the Repairs You Can Print contest.

We’ve got a twofer for awesome remote-controlled hovering stuff. The first is a 1:8 scale Harrier. This plane designed and built by [Joel Vlashof] will be a reasonably accurate model of a Harrier, capable of VTOL. It’s built around a huge 130mm EDF, powered by 2x6s lipos, and stabilized with a kk2.1 flight controller with VTOL software. This is as accurate a Harrier that you’re going to get in such a small format, and has the cool little spinny vanes that allow the beast to transition from vertical to horizontal flight.

Want some more cool hovering things? [Tom Stanton] is building a remote controlled Chinook. Yes, that helicopter with two main rotors. The usual way of doing this is with proper helicopter control systems like collectives and Jesus nuts. [Tom]’s building this version with standard quadcopter technology, mounting a motor to a servo, and doubling it up, and mounting it on a frame. In effect, this RC Chinook is the tail boom of a tricopter doubled up on a single frame. It does fly, and he’s even built a neat foamboard body for it.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is going to do something next Tuesday, sometime in the afternoon, east coast time. Whatever happens, it’s going to be spectacular.

Hey, it’s time for a poll. I need to decide between ‘tide pod’ and ‘solo jazz’. For what I’m doing, the cost and effort are the same, I just need to know which is more ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ, cool, or whatever. Right now it’s 50:50. One must be crowned victorious!

Here’s the stupidest thing you’re going to see all year. That’s someone looping a quadcopter in front of a Frontier A320 (Probably. Seems too big for a 319 and too small for a 321) on approach. This guy is 3.6 miles East of runway 25L at McCarran Internation in Las Vegas, at an altitude far above the 400-foot limit. Judging from the video and the wingspan, this quad came within 200 feet of a plane carrying at least 150 people. It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen, so don’t do it. It’ll be great to see the guy responsible for this in jail.