An Amplifier Circuit Good Enough To Eat

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[Dino’s] kitchen skills match his hardware hacking prowess. Look really close at the image above and you’ll realize this collection of transistors and passive components is edible. Rather than decorating cookies for the holidays he built this audio amplifier from gingerbread, icing, and candy.

The thing is, [Dino] almost always has that extra touch to his presentations. If you watch the video after the break you’ll notice that the sound is not the crystal clear quality we’re used to hearing in his video. That’s because he used the hardware from which the edible offering was modeled to do the audio for the presentation clip.

After laying out the design using Express PCB he gets down to business. The base, which is gingerbread, looks just like a square of Radio Shack protoboard. To make the diodes he rolled up some tin foil around a screw driver to use as a mold for sugar and water which had been boiled long enough to give a dark color. A similar technique was used to cast the other parts. Everything was tied together using frosting and pieces of red and black licorice.

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More Details About Laser Cut Gingerbread Houses

Members of Sector67 tried their hands at laser cut gingerbread houses. The Madison, Wisconsin based hackerspace is using the tabbed box method of assembly for the corners of the structure. They’ve also put up a bunch of information about laser settings and published the recipe used to mix up a sheet of gingerbread. This quite a bit more info than was provided with the project we saw a couple of weeks back.

The initial designs were made in Inkscape and then transferred to Corel Draw before heading to the cutter. They’ve got a 150W machine and found that a speed of 15 worked well when the speed was set to 100, with a corner speed of 60. The raw dough was rolled out to 1/8″ thickness. Possibly the best tip coming out of Sector67 is to lay 1/8″ dowels on either side of the dough. This way the rolling pin will stop when it hits the dowels resulting in the best possible uniform thickness. As reported in the previous project the odor generated while cutting is not the most pleasant. But we love the fusion of lasers with the age old process of building with cookies and decorating with candy.

Tea-bagging An Arduino

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[Dmitry Narkevich] likes a strong cup of tea and his method of getting there is to oscillate the tea bag as it steeps. But why take the time to do this when you can make an Arduino brew your tea for you. As you can see, he rigged up a system to move the tea bag as it steeps in his metal bottle.

The motion is provided by a hobby servo connected to an Arduino. This makes timing the process very simple and we’d imaging it’s only a matter of time before he adds an alarm so he’ll know when it’s ready. But the real hack comes in the apparatus that connects the servo to the bottle. Since he’ll be drinking out of it the assembly needs to be easy to remove and should be able to stand up to the abuse of being clamped on and taken off a few times each day.

The base of the device is a guitar capo. This is meant to gently clamp to the finger board of a guitar using spring tension so it is already covered in rubber which gives it a firm grip on the bottle’s opening. The servo is connected to a metal part from a stapler, and the string drapes over the body of a disposable pen. Don’t miss this in action in the clip after the break.

If you don’t have a servo on hand you could try using the sled from an optical drive.

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Design A Gingerbread House In CAD, Then Cut Pieces With A Laser

This is one of those ideas that’s so simple we can’t believe we haven’t heard of it before now. [Johan von Konow] is upping his holiday decorating game this year by designing his Gingerbread House in CAD and cutting it out on a laser cutter. If designed well this will easily allow you to increase the complexity of your design by orders of magnitude.

We remember making Gingerbread Houses with mom when we were little. She would bake a sheet of gingerbread, then pull out stencils she had made from file folders to carefully cut the walls and roof of the houses. But these were the homesteading equivalent of candy construction — one room consisting of four walls and two roof pieces. [Johan’s] design uses roofs with multiple pitches, dormers, and an entryway off the front of the main building. Quite impressive!

He mentions a few things to keep in mind. The gingerbread should be an even thickness for best results. You’re also going to want to plan for ventilation during cutting and give up the idea that you might eat the house when the holidays are over. The cutting process creates quite a stink and leaves a horribly burnt taste in the baked goods. Of course you could always cut out templates and use a knife when working with food.

Skittles Sorting Machine Sorts Skittles, Keeps The Band Happy

In 1982, Van Halen had the biggest stage show around. Their rider – a document going over the requirements for the show – reflects this. In the middle of the requirements for the lighting and sound rigs, Van Halen placed a rather odd request; one (1) bowl of M&M, (ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES). The theory being if the request for no brown M&Ms wasn’t followed, the lighting and sound rigs probably weren’t up to spec either.

It’s not M&Ms this time (they wouldn’t fit in the machine), but [egenriether] came up with a seriously clever solution for sorting Skittles by color. Why? We have no idea, other than, ‘just because.’

The build details are a little scant, but we know [egenriether] used a BASIC Stamp 2 for the electronics portion of the build. To sort the Skittles by color, a TAOS RGB color sensor reads the red, green, and blue values for each Skittle and actuates a servo that guides each piece of candy into its respective bowl.

It’s a very, very cool, if completely useless build. Still, we’re thinking it could be put to use if [egenriether] is ever backstage setting up before the band arrives.

Videos after the break. Thanks [Andrew] for sending this one in.

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Automate Your Tea Time

There are a couple of things that go into a great cup of tea. One is to have the water at the correct temperature, the other is to steep for just the right amount of time. This offering solves the latter by extracting the tea bag after a carefully timed steep.

It’s hard to imagine how this could be more simple. The timing mechanism is a cheap egg timer which has been modified to include a paperclip which moves with the minute hand. When the timer hits zero that paper clip contacts a stationary electrode, which powers the motor. That motor is the laser sled from a dead CD-ROM drive. Since these usually die because of the lens (not the mechanism) this is a great re-use of the internals. The sled zips to one side until it hits a limiting switch which kills the power. At the same time, this motion uses the wooden lever to extract the tea bag. All of this is explained in the clip after the jump.

Since the egg timer already has its own bell, you’ll even be alerted that it’s tea time!

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Red-bullet: Cooking Stove From Cans, Fueled By Gas Additive

A couple of beverage containers and a little bit of fuel additive bring together this aluminum can stove project. When lit it shoots flames out each of those holes around the top to heat the vessel resting upon it. [Peter Geiger] calls it the Red-Bullet because one of the stove pieces started as a Red Bull can and the other piece was a Coors (aka silver bullet).

This is basically an alcohol stove. We remember seeing a very well designed version of the penny stove several years back. This is different as it uses a side burner so the stove itself functions as the kettle stand. [Peter] started by cutting the Red Bull can just a bit taller than the final height. He then inserted the top portion of one of those aluminum beer cans that are shaped like glass bottles. The neck was lopped off and inverted. It is joined with the other can base using JB weld and by rolling the aluminum in on itself. After that has dried the holes are added and it’s filled with HEET from a yellow bottle. This gasoline additive is meant to sequester water and keep your gas line from freezing. The yellow bottle is mainly alcohol, the red is methanol so make sure you use the right one!