Margarita Drip Infuser Ensures A Perfect Mix

October 14, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

In order to get a margarita just right, the various ingredients need to be mixed together quite vigorously to over-come the different viscosity of the fluids. Looking to create his own barbot of sorts, [TVMiller] decided to make a Margarita Drip Infuser to help make margaritas a bit easier.

Using various chem lab supplies, [TVMiller] has cobbled together something pretty awesome. The Infuser can take up to 8 different ingredients into its test tube reserves, and after the drink ingredients are programmed on the computer, the magic begins.

An Arduino Uno controls a bank of 8 relays which control small fluid solenoids, with each control pulse releasing just a single droplet of fluid. An LED for each valve is run in parallel adding a bit of a light show to the mixing experience. If that’s not enough, he’s also created a copper cooling coil to chill the drink as it is poured.

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DIY Magnetic Stirrer Looks Professional

September 18, 2014 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

Stirrers are used in chemistry and biology labs to mix containers full of liquids. Magnetic stirrers are often preferred over the mechanical types because they are more sterile, easier to clean and have no external moving parts. Magnetic stirrers quickly rotate a magnet below the glass beaker containing the liquids that need mixing. The magnetic field travels effortlessly through the glass and reacts against a small magnetic cylinder called the stir bar. The spinning stir bar mixes the contents and is the only part of the mixer that touches the liquids.

[Malcolm] built his own magnetic stirrer. Unlike some DIY stirrers out on the ‘web, this one gets an “A” for aesthetics. It’s clean white lines allow it to look right at home in the professional laboratory. The graduated knob looks good and is functional too as the the potentiometer it is attached to allows multiple mixing speeds. Surprisingly, a D-size battery is all that is needed to power the stirrer. Most of the parts required for this project can be found in your spare parts bin. [Malcolm] has written some excellent instructions on how he made the stirrer including a parts list and schematics.

Want to make a magnetic stirrer but aren’t into chemistry or biology? No worries… I pity the fool who don’t build one of these….

The Science Of Strengthening Glass

August 10, 2014 by Rick Osgood 24 Comments

Strengthen Glass

[Ben Krasnow] is at it again. This time he’s explaining a simple method for strengthening glass. As usual, he does a fantastic job of first demonstrating and explaining the problem and then following it up with a solution.

[Ben] first uses a simple rig to place a controlled amount of force against a glass microscope slide. His experiment shows that the slide shatters once about 30psi of force has been applied to the center of the slide.

[Ben] then goes on to explain that current methods for producing glass leave many tiny impurities, or cracks, in the glass. As the glass slide flexes, the inside edge is placed into a compression force while the outside edge is under tension. The glass is more easily able to handle the compression force. The tension is where things start to break down. The tension force eventually causes those tiny impurities to spread, resulting in the shattering glass.

One possible solution to this problem is to find a way to fill in those tiny impurities. According to [Ben], most glass has sodium added to it in order to lower the melting temperature. [Ben] explains that if you could replace some of these smaller sodium atoms with larger atoms, you could essentially “fill” many of the tiny impurities in the glass.

[Ben] does this himself by heating up a small vat of potassium nitrate. Once the powder becomes molten, he submerges the glass slides in the solution for several hours. During this time, some of the sodium atoms are replaced by potassium atoms due to the natural process of diffusion.

Once the slides have cooled down, [Ben] demonstrates that they become much stronger. When placed in the testing rig, the stronger slides do not break until the pressure gets between 60psi and 70psi. That’s twice as strong as the original glass. All that extra strength from such a simple process. Be sure to watch the full video below. Continue reading “The Science Of Strengthening Glass” →

Connecting Inexpensive PH Probes With Ease

May 26, 2014 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKigsN8046k&w=580]

We’ve mentioned that it’s hard to find someone not selling or crowd funding something at Maker Faire. Despite the fact that [Ryan Edwards] is selling his boards, we still got the feeling that he’s a hacker who is selling just to make sure the idea he had is available for other hackers to use. He showed us his interface boards for inexpensive pH probes.

Since we’re always looking for more chemistry hacks to run, it was nice to hear [Ryan’s] description on how these probes (which can be had for around $9 on eBay) actually work. It turns out it’s all about salt. When it comes to the electronics, the board provides a connector for the probe on one edge, and pins for voltage, ground, and I2C on another. Rig this up with your microcontroller of choice and you’ll be building your own automatic pool doser, fish tank minder, or one of a multitude of food-related hacks.

Head on over to Sparky’s Widgets to see a few other demo applications.

Homemade Liquid Nitrogen

May 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

As far as DIY cryogenics are concerned, dry ice is easy mode. You can get frozen carbon dioxide at WalMart, or from a nozzle that screws onto a CO2 tank. It’s all very ordinary, and not really special at all. Want to know what’s cool? Making liquid nitrogen at home.

[imsmooth] is getting his nitrogen from a standard tank, sending the gas through a CO2 and H2O scrubber, compressing it, putting the compressed gas in an ice bath, and slowly diffusing the compressed, cooled gas into a vacuum reservoir. When the cold compressed gas is released into the reservoir, Boyle’s law happens and liquid nitrogen condenses in a flask.

As far as materials and equipment are concerned, [imsmooth] is using a PVC tower filled with zeolite to filter out the CO2 and H2O, a SCUBA compressor (no oil), and an almost absurd amount of stainless steel tubing for the precooler and regenerative cooling tower. Except for a few expensive valves, dewar, and the SCUBA compressor, it’s all stuff you could easily scrounge up from the usual home improvement stores.

[imsmooth] is producing about 350cc/hr of liquid nitrogen, or more than enough for anyone who isn’t running an industrial process in their garage. Check out the video of the build below.

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Testing The Efficiency Of PCB Etchants

May 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 73 Comments

etch In the interest of the scientific method [Feynmaniac] (great name, btw) over on Instructables has posted a little experiment on something we all, no doubt, care about: putting PCB traces in copper clad boards with the most common etchants out there.

The experiment used the ‘ol standard, ferric chloride, and the safe, inexpensive newcomer, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and table salt. Finding the most efficient mixture of ferric chloride is easy: just use what’s in the bottle. The vinegar and H2O2 requires some stoichiometry, though, and [Feynmaniac] calculated that with an 8% acetic acid solution and the most commonly available 3% peroxide solution, a 2:3 ratio of peroxide to vinegar is the best. Salt to taste, or until everything turns green.

Four copper clad boards were used for the test, masked off in a ‘barcode’ pattern. Two methods of applying the etchant were used: either rubbing the etchant on with a sponge, or immersing the boards in a bath of the etchant being tested.

In terms of speed, ferric chloride was by far the fastest, with 3 minutes until the board was etched using the rubbing method, or 10 minutes when simply immersed. Vinegar/peroxide took longer with 11 minutes rubbed, and 20 minutes immersed. No differences in the quality of the etch were noticed.

While ferric chloride was by far the fastest etchant, it does have the downside of being environmentally unfriendly and fairly expensive. The vinegar and peroxide etchant is safe, cheap, and can be found in any grocery store on the planet.

This experiment didn’t test other common etchants like HCl and H202, or cupric chloride (which is is the byproduct of HCl and H202). Still, it’s a good confirmation that the vinegar and peroxide method actually works, in case you were wondering.

Building EL Displays On A PCB

April 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Elecrolumiscent displays have seen a huge swing in popularity recently, but only in limited forms like EL wire or flat EL panels. You can, of course, cut and bend these wires and panels to suit any purpose, but custom shaped EL displays are just the bee’s knees. They’re not hard to fabricate, either: with cheap custom PCBs, all it takes to make custom EL panels is just a few chemicals.

[Nick]’s method of fabricating custom EL displays uses an exposed copper layer on a PCB you’d pick up from OSHpark or any of the random board houses in China. The process consists of designing a display – be it a few letters, pixels, or a seven-segment arrangement. The display ‘stack’ is a layer of painted-on dialectric, a phospor, and finally a translucent conductive ink that connects the display segments to ground. It looks like an extremely easy process, and from the pictures it looks like [Nick] is making some EL displays of reasonable quality.

[Nick]’s work was inspired by the grand poobah of homebrew electrolumiscent displays, [Jeri Ellsworth], who managed to make a similar EL pixel on a PCB. [Nick]’s display looks great, though, and with a little work some custom segment displays should be very possible.