Spinach Photo Prints

February 13, 2021 by Brian McEvoy 14 Comments

Some people like spinach in their salads. Others would prefer it if it never gets near their fork. Still, other folks, like [Almudena Romero], use it for printing pictures, and they’re the folks we’ll focus on today.

Anthotypes are positive images made from plant dyes that fade from light exposure. Imagine you stain your shirt at a picnic and leave it in the sun with a fork covering part of the stain. When you come back, the stain not sheltered by cutlery is gone, but now you have a permanent fork shape logo made from aunt Bev’s BBQ sauce. The science behind this type of printmaking is beautifully covered in the video below the break. You see, some plant dyes are not suitable for light bleaching, and fewer still if you are not patient since stains like blueberry can take a month in the sun.

The video shows how to make your own plant dye, which has possibilities outside of anthotype printing. Since the dye fades in sunlight, it can be a temporary paint, or you could use samples all over your garden to find which parts get lots of sunlight since the most exposed swatches will be faded the most. Think of a low-tech UV meter with logging, but it runs on spinach.

If the science doesn’t intrigue you, the artistic possibilities are equally cool. All the pictures have a one-of-a-kind, wabi-sabi flare. You take your favorite photo, make it monochrome, print it on a transparent plastic sheet, and the ink will shield the dye and expose the rest. We just gave you a tip about finding the sunniest spot outdoors, so get staining.

Anthotype printing shares some similarities with etch-resist in circuit board printing processes, but maybe someone can remix spinach prints with laser exposure!

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Would You Like Fries With Your Insect Burger, Ma’am?

February 10, 2021 by Jenny List 167 Comments

A trip to a supermarket is a rare luxury in a pandemic lockdown, but were I to cruise the aisles with my basket today I’d probably come away with a healthy pile of fruit and veg, a bit of meat and fish, and maybe some cheese. My shopping basket in 2031 though might have a few extras, and perhaps surprisingly some of them might be derived from insects. That’s a future made a little closer, by EU scientists declaring that farmed insect products are safe for humans and animals to eat.

Global map showing meat consumption in 2013 — Is meat consumption at this level sustainable? Our World In Data, CC BY 3.0.

We humans, like some of our fellow great ape cousins, are omnivores. We can eat anything, even if we might not always want to eat some things twice. As such, the diets of individual populations would in the past have varied hugely depending on the conditions that existed wherever they lived, giving us the ability to spread to almost anywhere on the planet — and we have.

Over the past few hundred years this need to subsist only on foods locally available has been marginalized by advances in agriculture. For those of us in developed countries, any foodstuff that takes our fancy can be ours for a trivial effort. This has meant an explosion of meat consumption as what was once a luxury food has become affordable to the masses, and in turn a corresponding agricultural expansion to meet demand that has placed intolerable stresses on ecosystems and is contributing significantly to global warming. It’s very clear that a mass conversion to veganism is unlikely to take place, so could farmed insects be the answer to our cravings for meat protein? It’s likely to be a tough sell to consumers, but it’s a subject that bears more examination. Continue reading “Would You Like Fries With Your Insect Burger, Ma’am?” →

Machine Learning In The Kitchen Makes For Tasty Mashup Desserts

February 3, 2021 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

What did you do during lockdown? A whole lot of people turned to baking in between trips to the store to search for toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Many of them baked bread for some reason, but like us, [Sara Robinson] turned to sweeter stuff to get through it.

The first Cakie ever made. Image via Google Cloud

Her pandemic ponderings wandered into the realm of baking existentialist questions, like what separates baked goods from each other, categorically speaking? What is the science behind the crunchiness of cookies, the sponginess of cake, and the fluffiness of bread?

As a developer advocate for Google Cloud, [Sara] turned to machine learning to figure out why the cookie crumbles. She collected 33 recipes each of cookies, cake, and bread and built a TensorFlow model to analyze them, which resulted in a cookie/cake/bread lineage for each recipe in a set of percentages. Not only was the model able to accurately classify recipes by type, [Sara] was able to use the model to come up with a 50/50 cookie-cake hybrid recipe. The AI delivered a list of ingredients to which she added vanilla extract and chocolate chips for flavor. From there, she had to wing it and come up with her own baking directions for the Cakie.

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NASA Challenge Offers Prizes For Sprouting Astronaut Food Systems

January 25, 2021 by Maya Posch 53 Comments

Humans have unfortunately not yet evolved the ability to photosynthesize or recharge from an electricity source, which is why astronauts well into the future of spaceflight will need to have access to food sources. Developing ways to grow food in space is the focus of the new Deep Space Food Challenge that was just launched by NASA and Canada’s Space Agency (CSA).

With a total of twenty $25,000 USD prizes for US contestants and ten $30,000 CAD prizes for the Canucks in Phase 1 of the challenge, there’s some financial incentive as well. In Phase 2, the winning teams of the concept phase have to show off their kitchen skills, and in the final Phase 3 (deadline by Fall 2023) the full food growing system has to be demonstrated.

The possible systems here would likely involve some kind of hydroponics, aeroponics or even aquaponics, to save the weight of lugging kilograms of soil into space. None of this is truly new technology, but cramming it into a package that would be able to supply a crew of four with enough food during a three-year mission does seem fairly challenging.

The NASA rules are covered in their Phase 1 Rules PDF document. While international teams are also welcome to compete, they cannot receive any prizes beyond recognition, and Chinese citizens or companies with links to China are not to allowed to compete at all.

Pulse Oximetry Sensor Judges Your Coffee Roast

October 22, 2020 by Donald Papp 24 Comments

Breakout board for the MAX30101, which [Zach] used as the basis of his roast gauge. The sensor is at the top edge of the board.

Parts designed and marketed for a specific application can nevertheless still be useful in other ways, and whenever that happens, it’s probably the start of a pretty good hack. Using a sensor for something other than its intended purpose is exactly what [Zach Halvorson] did to make the Roast Vision device, which uses the MAX30101, a sealed optical sensor intended mainly for pulse oximetry and heart-rate monitoring.

[Zach] is instead using that sensor to measure the roast level of coffee beans, and assign a consistent number from 0 to 35 to represent everything from Very Dark to Very Light. Measuring a bean’s roast level is important to any roaster seeking accuracy and consistency, but when [Zach] found that commercial roast gauges could easily cost over a thousand dollars, he was sure he could do better.

[Zach] settled on using a Sparkfun MAX30101 breakout board to develop his device, and Sparkfun shared an informative blog post that demonstrates how making hardware and tools more accessible can help innovative ideas flourish. The Roast Vision device has a 3D printed enclosure, and a simple top-loading design with an integrated sample cup makes it easy to use. One simply puts about a teaspoon of finely-ground coffee into the sample cup, and the unit provides a measurement in a couple of seconds. Fortunately the sensor works just fine though an acrylic window which means the device can be sealed; a handy feature for a tool that will spend a lot of time around ground coffee.

The joys of fresh roasted coffee is something that is perfectly accessible to those making small batches at home. There are commercial options for small roasters of course, but should you wish to go the DIY route, check out our own Elliot Williams’ guide on making a low-cost DIY roaster.

Gas Powered Blender Packs Real Grunt

October 16, 2020 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

Whether you’re into fruit smoothies or icy blended cocktails, a blender comes in handy when preparing these beverages in the kitchen. But, if a small electric motor can do the job well, a noisy combustion engine can certainly do it louder. This is demonstrated ably by this project from [JT Makes It].

The build is a steel-framed contraption, mounting a small gas engine of the type you’d typically find in a weed trimmer or other garden tool. It’s attached to a shaft allowing it to spin a blender blade at up to 41,000 rpm when unloaded. A stout metal container is mounted on top, along with a plexiglass lid to ensure the contents of the bowl don’t escape when the blender is in action.

It’s a fun build, and one that has no trouble turning a bucket of apples into mush in under 60 seconds. More realistically, [JT] is able to whip up several litres of blended cocktail without major effort, which would be great for parties. Though, we do imagine the burning oil and gas fumes does somewhat spoil the taste sensation. We’ve seen similar hacks before, like this nitro-fuelled pencil sharpener. Video after the break.

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Fermenting Yogurt With The Help Of Hardware

September 26, 2020 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

Fermentation is a natural process that has been exploited by humanity for millennia. Behind such favorites as cheese and beer, it takes just the right conditions to get the desired results. To aid in this process, and to explore the crafts of their ancestors, [Victoria] and [Petar] created an electronic fermentation quilt.

Bulgarian yogurt was the tasty end result from this work.

Anyone familiar with breadmaking will be familiar with throwing a cloth over dough when left to rest. This is all about temperature management, providing optimum conditions for the yeast to work their magic. This fermentation quilt takes things to the next level, integrating soft heater pads and temperature sensing hardware into the fabric itself. Rather than acting as a simple insulator, the quilt can actively supply heat where needed, switching off when reaching the set temperature. In this example, the quilt is set to maintain a temperature of 45 degrees for the optimum production of Bulgarian yogurt.

The fermentation quilt serves as an excellent example of what can be achieved when combining textiles with smart electronics. Tools like Adafruit’s Lilypad and conductive thread all come together to make this a functional and useful device, and shows that electronic textiles aren’t just limited to blinky wearables.

Fermentation is a popular topic among hackers, with [Trent Fehl]’s Supercon talk at the 2019 Supercon covering similar ground from a sourdough perspective. It goes to show that hardware skills can pay off in the kitchen, too!