Cooking Up Piezo Crystals At Home

March 15, 2011 by Mike Nathan 56 Comments

piezo_crystal

[Collin] loves piezos – and why not?

According to him, they are about as close to magic as you can find in the world. We can’t really disagree on that one – there’s something oddly enchanting about piezoelectric materials.

Most commercially used piezoelectric devices that you find today are constructed out of man-made ceramic materials such as Lead zirconate titanate, and can be found in grill starters, gas-powered water heaters, etc. While they are common, it’s not exactly easy to synthesize these sorts of ceramic materials at home.

You can however, create piezoelectric crystals in your kitchen, using just a few simple ingredients. In his video, [Collin] shows us how to create Rochelle Salt, one of the first known materials found to exhibit piezoelectricity. The recipe calls for three ingredients, cream of tartar, sodium carbonate (soda ash), and water – that’s it. The procedure is quite simple, requiring you to heat a solution of water and cream of tartar, adding the soda ash a little at a time once it reaches the proper temperature. The solution is filtered after it turns clear and then left to sit overnight while the crystals form.

Take a look at the video embedded below to see how his Rochelle Crystals turned out, and be sure to try this out with your kids if they are interested in electronics. Making crystals that generate electricity when tapped is far cooler than making rock candy any day, trust us on this.

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Simple PCB Etchant Made From Chemicals You Can Put In Your Mouth

March 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 68 Comments

etching_test

[Stephen] often finds the need to make his own PCBs at home, and when he got the urge to do some etching recently, he realized that he was fresh out of “Ferret Chloride and Bureaucratic Acid*.” Undeterred by his empty chemical cabinet, he poked around in his kitchen mixing together anything and everything that might have the ability to strip copper from a PCB.

Now, we don’t necessarily recommend this course of action, but it seems that he finally hit upon a winner. He discovered a formula that can be made at home from simple and safe household ingredients which does the job quite nicely. A fair warning however, standard ferric chloride disposal procedures need to be followed when using this solution.

If you want to know what he concocted in his kitchen as well as the chemistry behind it, you will have to visit his site, we won’t ruin it for you. You can however, see the solution at work in the video we have posted below.

*His joke, not ours

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Arduino-Fart-O-Meter

February 16, 2011 by Kevin Dady 24 Comments

[robomaniac] shows us some serious application of modern technology with his recent Instructable, (the) Arduino-Fart-O-Meter. The wireless device uses a “perfboard Arduino” to read a remote wired methane sensor, and send data over a nRF2401A radio transceiver.

“The data” is picked up by another Arduino / transceiver combo, which then drives a servo motor connected to the pointer. The meter itself consists of 6 ranges from “Fresh Air” to “Liquid” so there is no doubt in your standing.

The wireless and remote sensor setup makes this an easy device to include into your loved ones chairs while having the meter far enough away (just in case you have to make a run for it). If you want some more accuracy check out the Fart intensity detector we posted about, which adds in temperature and sound to the equation, or how about a chair that twitters your toots?

Join us after the break for a quick video, its a real gas.

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Accidental LED Fabrication

December 28, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

[Grenadier] had a piece of silicon carbide sitting around that he planned to use when making a primitive diode called a Cat’sWhisker Diode. While probing he noticed that one of the crystals threw off a bit of light. He popped it off and used JB Weld to attach it to a brass plate. The peculiar thing is that it generates light when power is run through it both forward and reverse biased. So what’s going on here? According to an informed discussion on the phenomenon there’s actually a pair of diodes in series but with their polarity reversed.

Oxyhydrogen Water Rocket

December 20, 2010 by Noah Dunker 37 Comments

[cmwslw] built a soda-bottle water rocket that uses the ignition of oxyhydrogen gas to quickly expel the water, as opposed to the usual compressed air and water mixture. His project contains excellent documentation with photos and it builds on other articles he’s written about generating the flammable HHO gas used to launch his craft into the skies. Every aspect of this project uses items most of us have at home or could score cheaply at most hardware stores.

We love seeing projects that re-purpose everyday materials into something fun. Just be sure to dodge the missile pop bottle as it speeds back to Earth!

Building A Spectrophotometer

December 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

What can you make with a toilet paper roll, duct tape, and a graphing calculator? A stand for your homemade spectrometer. This is neither as pretty nor as accurate as a precision scientific instrument, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. In fact, it works perfectly well for rudimentary observations. Light is shined through a sample solution, passes through a diffraction grating, then shows up as bands of color on the projection surface seen above. The photosensor mounted on the cardboard tube was pulled from a night-light, and is read using the ruler and the multimeter. This results in two data units that are used to graph the results. As long as you’re running test samples as a control this simple setup will yield useful information for the scientist on a shoe-string budget.

[via BoingBoing]