Making S’mores With 50,000 Volts

August 26, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 12 Comments

[Skyy] sent us a video of him cooking s’mores with an electric arc. He’s using a flyback transformer with a zero voltage switching (ZVS) driver. This produces about 50 kV, which is more than enough to toast the marshmallow.

ZVS is a technique that triggers the semiconductor switches when they have zero voltage across them. This ensures that there’s minimal heat created by the switches, since they are not interrupting any current at the time they are toggled. ZVS is also used in lighting dimmers to switch off power without creating interference.

If you’re interested in the details, there’s a great tutorial on building the driver. If you’re interested in learning how it works, check out this simulation video.

[Skyy] admits that his setup isn’t terribly safe since it uses a breadboard, which isn’t rated for the high voltages and currents. Keep in mind that these circuits could kill you. After the break, watch a marshmallow fry in a 50 kV arc.

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Preserve Your Garden Bounty With A Solar Food Drier

August 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

solar-food-drier

The [VelaCreations] family lives off the grid, getting the electricity that they actually use from solar and wind power. When they started looking for ways to preserve the fruit and vegetables now coming into harvest the electricity consumption and cost of a food dehydrator made them balk. What they do have plenty of at this time of year is sun and heat, so they built their own solar food drier.

The frame is made of welded square tube. They mention that you will have to alter it if you don’t have welding tools, but building your own MOT welder is just one more fun project to take on. The frame has wood rails to hold the trays of food. It is enclosed with translucent polycarbonate sheets. There is a vent in the top as well as the bottom. As the heat from the sun builds inside, it flows upward, sucking fresh air in the bottom. This carries away moisture from the food and can be regulated by adjusting the size of the bottom vent.

Copper Kettle Just For The Hipster Coffee Scene

July 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Handmade coffee is a feature we need to write. But for now we present this copper kettle which is designed to pour out the boiling water very slowly in order to achieve the perfect cup of slow-drip java.

[CHS] made the kettle for his friend [Nate]. The entire process starts off with an arc of flat copper sheet which makes a slightly conical cylinder when curved until the two ends meet. Getting a water tight seal on this seam is imperative and it took four or five tries to reach perfection.

To get the kettle in shape [CHS] improvised a mandrel out of a thin slice of railroad track. After polishing it smooth it goes on the inside of the copper and gives him something to hammer against. We think this step is magic… It’s kind of like the old sculpting adage that you remove everything that isn’t what you’re trying to end up with. The beauty of the piece really pops out as the final curves are hammered into the work.

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Shifting Gears On Your Pig Roasting Spit

July 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

bicycle-gear-pig-roaster

[Tim] and [Jon] have a hankering for some pork product of their own making. Your average residential kitchen is ill-equipped to handle an entire pig, so they got down to business building this pig spit out of old bicycle parts.

The main components in the project are two stands built out of square tube which go on either side of the cooking fire (coal bed?). They include bearings to support a horizontal bar on which a pig carcass is somehow mounted. The whole point of a spit is to turn it while cooking, and that’s where the gear system comes in. The front crank from a bicycle was welded onto the spit, with one pedal still in place. This way if the motorized system breaks down they can still turn the thing by hand.

The crank connects to the cogs with one chain, while the other chain connects the cogs to a windshield wiper motor. When connected to the specified 12V it turns around 6 rpm; close but a bit too fast. After some trial and error they found a 5V supply turns it at the optimal 2 rpm.

We wonder if you can put a whole pig in a meat smoker?

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The Most Advanced Microwave You’ll Ever Own

July 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

raspberry-pi-microwave

Voice activation, one-touch cooking, web controls, cooking settings based on UPC… have you ever seen a microwave with all of these features? We sure haven’t. We thought it was nice that ours have a reheat button with three different settings. But holy crap, what if you could actually program your microwave to the exact settings of your choice? You can, if you let a Raspberry Pi do the cooking.

This hack run deep and results in a final product with a high WAF. Nathan started by taking apart his old microwave. He took pictures of the flexible sheets that make up the control button matrix in order to reverse engineer their design. This led him to etch his own circuit board to hook the inputs up to a Raspberry Pi board and take command of all the appliance’s other hardware. Because it also drives the seven segment display you’ll never see the wrong time on this appliance again. It’s set based on NTP.

We mentioned you can tweak settings for a specific food. The best way of doing this is shown in the demo video. The web interface is used to program the settings. Recalling them is as simple as using the barcode reader to scan the UPC. Amazing.

Now you can keep that old microwave working, rather than just scraping it for parts.

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Hack It: In-refrigerator Egg Monitoring

July 9, 2013 by Mike Szczys 78 Comments

Here’s a concept piece that monitors the eggs in your refrigerator. It’s still in development and we don’t think the general public is ready for digital egg monitoring quite yet. But we love the concept and want to hear from you to see if you could develop your own version.

What we know about the device is that — despite the image which makes smart phone proximity seem important — it connects to the Internet from inside your fridge. It will tell you how many eggs you have left, and even tracks the date at which each entered your refrigerator.

So, what’s inside this thing and who can build their own the fastest? We’ll cover some specs and speculate a bit to get you started: There’s a light sensor to detect when the door opens and an LED below each egg to illuminate the oldest. We think the light sensor triggers a microcontroller that uses each of the egg LEDs as a light sensor as well. If the threshold is too low then there is indeed an egg in that cup. We also like the fact that the tray has fourteen slots; as long as you don’t buy eggs until you have just two left you’ll always have room.

If you build one we want to know. We’re thinking 3D printed cups, low-power microcontroller, but we’re kind of stumped on the cheapest WiFi solution. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

[via Reddit via NY Daily News via Mind of Geek]

Putting Two Years Into One Bowl

July 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Over the last few months, [Frank Howarth] has been putting a lot of effort into a gigantic sequoia log he started milling two years ago. He recently completed a wonderful chair, but in the years these gigantic blocks of lumber have been sitting around, he’s always had one project in the back of his mind: a giant wooden bowl made from this sequoia log.

The wood for this bowl came from a relatively small cutoff from the original sequoia log. [Frank] had initially cut this cutoff into a circle to let it dry for an eventual run on a lathe. The bowl blank was so big, though, that he needed to create a jig to trim off most of the excess and keep from wasting many hours with a gouge.

With a bowl this large – about 20 inches across – simply screwing it onto the lathe wasn’t an option. [Frank] had to construct a jig for his chuck, capable of holding the bowl by the rim so he could shape the bottom.

The end product, coated with linseed oil and beeswax, is a work of art. Making anything this size on a lathe takes a lot of skill, and we’re thankful for [Frank] sharing it with us.