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.

Pull-out Pantry Fills Space Next To Refrigerator

July 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

pull-out-pantry

Your refrigerator needs a few inches of space on the hinge side in order for the door to open fully. If there’s a wall on that side it means you leave a gap. A bit of lumber and some inexpensive hardware can turn that gap into a pull-out pantry.

This picture is from [Ratmax00’s] pantry project. He had a 6.5″ gap to work with and started the build by making a wooden frame using pocket screws for the butt joints. Four casters were added to the bottom to make it roll in and out easily. He needed a handle and a way to make sure commodities didn’t fall off the shelves. He chose to use a 3D printer for brackets that hold the fence dowels and a custom handle. If you don’t have that just hit the cabinet hardware aisle at your local home store.

We wonder if it would have been possible to use full-extension draw rails mounted above and below the cabinet in addition to a couple of wheels? This would help keep the pantry from scraping against the fridge or the wall.

While you’re building bookshelf sized things why not get to work on a hidden door as well?

Black Ash Basket Weaving From Scratch

June 19, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 1 Comment

I don’t think I’ve ever seen basket weaving done from the point of harvesting the strips from a log. I mean, I knew the bits had to come from somewhere, but usually I see things like leaves or vines. Obviously I just hadn’t really thought about it this way. It is quite interesting.

Coopering Wine Barrels

June 17, 2013 by Caleb Kraft No comments

The process of making a high quality wine barrel is still done very much by hand. Each piece of wood is hand selected, even from the point of purchasing specific logs at auctions. In this video he is using many power tools and modern techniques, but still performing everything himself. I couldn’t find any videos of coopers using only hand tools, let me know if you find one.