Disinfect PPE On The Cheap With This Hardware Store UV-C Cabinet

April 12, 2020 by 91 Comments

The current situation has given closet germaphobes the world over a chance to get out there and clean the hell out of everything. Some of it may be overdone; we ourselves can cop to a certain excess as we wipe down cans and boxes when returning from a run to the grocery store. But sometimes disinfection is clearly indicated, and having an easy way to kill the bugs on things like face masks can make a big difference by extending the life of something that would normally be disposable. That’s where this quick and easy UV-C germicidal cabinet really shines.

The idea behind [Deeplocal]’s “YouVee” is to be something that can be quickly cobbled together from parts that can be picked up at any big-box home store, thereby limiting the number of trips out. You might even have everything needed already, which would make this a super simple build. The business end is a UV-C germicidal fluorescent lamp, of the kind used in clarifiers for backyard ponds. A fluorescent droplight is modified to accept the lamp by snipping off a bit of plastic, and the lamp is attached to the inside of the lid of a sturdy black plastic tote. The interior of the tote is lined with aluminum tape and a stand for items to be disinfected is made from a paint roller screen. The clever bit is the safety interlock; to prevent exposure to UV, the lamp needs to be unplugged before removing the lid. Check out the full build tutorial for details.

We can’t vouch for YouVee’s germicidal efficacy, but it seems like a solid design. If you have doubts, you could always measure the UV-C flux easily, or you could build a smaller version of this peroxide vapor PPE sterilizer, just to be sure.

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Measuring UV-C For About $5

March 27, 2020 by 90 Comments

Looking to sterilize something? Give it a good blast of the old UV-C. Ultraviolet radiation in the shortest wavelength band breaks down DNA and RNA, so it’s a great way to kill off any nasties that are lurking. But how much UV-C are you using? [Akiba] at Hackerfarm has come up with the NukeMeter, a meter that measures the output of their UV-C sterilizer the NukeBox. It is built around a $2.50 sensor and a $3 Arduino.

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A Smart Controller For Your DIY UV Cure Box

March 17, 2020 by No comments

Resin 3D printers are finally cheap enough that peons like us can finally buy them without skipping too many meals, and what means we’re starting to see more and more of them in the hands of hackers. But to get good results you’ll also want a machine to cure the prints with UV light; an added expense compared to more traditional FDM printers. Of course you could always build one yourself to try and save some money.

An earlier prototype build of the interface.

To that end, [sjm4306] is working on a very impressive controller for all your homebrew UV curing needs. The device is designed to work with cheap UV strip lights that can easily be sourced online, and all you need to bring to the table is a suitable enclosure to install them in. Here he’s using a metal paint can with a lid to keep from burning his eyes out, but we imagine the good readers of Hackaday could come up with something slightly more substantial while still taking the necessary precautions to not cook the only set of eyes you’ll ever have.

Of course, the enclosure isn’t what this project is really about. The focus here is on a general purpose controller, and it looks like [sjm4306] has really gone the extra mile with this one. Using a common OLED display module, the controller provides a very concise and professional graphical user interface for setting parameters such as light intensity and cure time. While the part is cooking, there’s even a nice little progress bar which makes it easy to see how much time is left even if you’re across the room.

At this point we’ve seen a number of hacked together UV cure boxes, but many of them skip the controller and just run the lights full time. That’s fine for a quick and dirty build, but we think a controller like this one could help turn a simple hack into a proper tool.

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Repurposed UV Curer Makes Your Prints Hard As Nails

March 15, 2020 by 28 Comments

The price of resin printers has dropped significantly in the last couple of years, and it’s down to the point where you can pick up a fairly decent DLP machine for less than $500. While this is great news, you still need several things beyond resin for successful prints, like a way to do post-process UV curing.

[Inhibit] picked up the formidably-priced Wanhao D7 awhile back. Rather than spending another printer’s worth of paper on a UV curing box, he rescued and repurposed a small commercial curing device meant for gel-based nail polish. You stick your fingertips in, switch it on, and it runs for 60 seconds and then shuts off.

It’s a great idea, but unfortunately prints don’t cure as fast as fingernails. So the first order of business was to bypass the dual 555-based timing system by wiring the UV LEDs directly to power. The manufacturer never intended for the lights to run continuously, so to keep the board from melting, [Inhibit] added in a small 12 V computer fan for cooling. There’s even a little printed grille with angled fins to keep UV light from leaking out and burning nearby retinas.

[Inhibit] also designed and printed a tray for the prints to sit on, and a front enclosure piece to focus as much light on the parts as possible. Files for both parts are floating around the Thingiverse, and we’ve got the build video all cured queued up after the break.

These little commercial boxes don’t cost all that much, but you could always just build your own.

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Disappearing Writing With UV Laser Reveals Whitening Agents In Myriad Products

August 6, 2019 by 11 Comments

Many a budding maker has experimented with invisible inks, with a wide variety of solutions having a viable set of properties for this purpose. However, [Ben Krasnow] stumbled upon a different method entirely when tinkering with a UV laser.

The effect is subtle, but remains visible for several minutes.

The laser in question was a MNL100 UV laser, configured to produce nanosecond-scale 20 kW pulses at up to 24 Hz, operating at wavelength of 337 nm, deep in the ultraviolet. After piping the laser light through an optical fiber and aiming it at some regular white paper, dark marks were observed, which disappear without a trace over the course of a few minutes.

Upon investigation, the dark marks seemed to be the result of fluorescent whitening agents in the paper. It appears they are overloaded or otherwise changed chemically by the laser, and slowly return back to normal over time. Further experiments showed that hydrogen peroxide was able to remove the marks instantly, and an argon atmosphere slowed the rate at which the marks faded.

It’s an interesting look at an odd chemical effect, with the benefit of a well-equipped optics lab to analyse what’s going on. Following the phenomenon down the rabbit hole leads to some tips on how to extract fluorescent additives from common laundry detergent. Be it paper, plastic, or textile, if it looks really bright white to your eye it probably contains stilbene organic compounds as optical brighteners, a hidden trait you never actually thought about before. Video after the break.

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Disrupting Cell Biology Hack Chat With Incuvers

June 3, 2019 by No comments

Join us on Wednesday 5 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Disrupting Cell Biology Hack Chat with Incuvers!

A lot of today’s most successful tech companies have creation myths that include a garage in some suburban neighborhood where all the magic happened. Whether there was literally a garage is not the point; the fact that modest beginnings can lead to big things is. For medical instrument concern Incuvers, the garage was actually a biology lab at the University of Ottawa, and what became the company’s first product started as a simple incubator project consisting of a Styrofoam cooler, a space blanket, and a Soda Stream CO2 cylinder controlled by an Arduino.

From that humble prototype sprang more refined designs that eventually became marketable products, setting the fledgling company on a course to make a huge impact on the field of cell biology with innovative incubators, including one that can image cell growth in real time. What it takes to go from prototype to product has been a common theme in this year’s Hack Chats, and Noah, Sebastian, and David from Incuvers will drop by Wednesday to talk about that and more.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday June 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

UV Glow Clock Tells The Time Glowingly

January 7, 2019 by 13 Comments

Reddit user [TuckerPi] wanted to make something to thank his father for helping him get through his engineering degrees. He hit it out of the park with this awesome glowing clock. The clock uses a strip of UV glow tape, which is rotated by a small stepper motor. On one side a UV LED is moved up and down by a second motor to make the tape glow underneath it. A Raspberry Pi drives the whole system, writing the time on the tape and rotating it to face outwards. Once a minute the clock rewrites the time on the rubber.

This is a lovely build that shows what [TuckerPI] learned in college, as he built most of the mechanism himself, cutting his own metal gears and parts and making a nice, simple case from African mahogany. He also shows his mistakes, such as his first attempt to build the glowing mechanism from silicon rubber mixed with UV powder. Although it worked initially, he found that the UV powder fell out of the rubber after a short while, so he replaced it with UV glow tape.

[TuckerPi] hasn’t published the full schematics of the device, but there is a lot of detail in the Imgur photos of the build and in the Reddit thread where he discussed the build. Kudos to him for finding an interesting and unique way to thank his father for his help.

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