Hot Enough For Ya? Super-cold Cocktail-pops Will Help

June 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

The staff of Instructables know how to cut loose and cool off in this already-too-hot summer. They’re making their own popsicles out of cocktails. If only everyone were lucky enough to have employers who endorse these kinds of projects at work.

So the problem here is the the freezing point of liquor. Your margarita, daiquiri, strawberry with champagne, white russian and other favorites just aren’t ever going to solidify in a run-of-the-mill freezer because zero degrees Fahrenheit just won’t cut it. So the big guns were brought to bear. The cocktail-pops were lined up in a container and dowsed with liquid nitrogen.

The substance boils off at around -321 F, more than cold enough to quickly freeze these alcoholic goodies. But use caution. After they’ve been frozen you need to throw them in the freezer to warm them up. The first guinea pigs burned their tongues when trying to lick the pops too soon.

Don’t want to buy your liquid nitrogen? Why not just make your own?

Finally, A 3D Printer For Burritos

June 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

[Marko] created a robot that prints burritos. Truly, we’ve reached new heights as a species.

The Burritob0t is based on the ORD Hadron 3d printer with a pair of air compressor/syringe-based extruders based on the Makerbot Frostruder. All the ingredients – rice, meat, salsa, and molten cheese – will be printed onto the surface of a tortilla heated by a Makerbot heated build platform.

[Marko] has some pretty neat plans for his Burritob0t such as an iPhone app for ordering your burritos and some sort of social commentary thing using burritos. We’re assuming [Marko] hasn’t yet got this Burritob0t up and running for the lack of any action shots or demo videos. That said, there’s a wonderful Flickr gallery and an about page that covers the artistic statement behind the Burritob0t.

If you want to get your own Burritobot, [Marko] hopes to have a Kickstarter up sometime in July.

Charting The Efficiencies Of Boiling Water

June 2, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Water takes a lot of energy to heat up. If you’d like evidence of this, simply jump into a 50° F swimming pool on Memorial Day. Despite the difficulty of heating water, that simple act accounts for a lot of industrial processes. From cooking a steak to running a nuclear reactor, there isn’t much that doesn’t involve heating water.

[Tom Murphy], Physics prof at UCSD decided to test out exactly how efficiently he could boil water. Armed with a gas stove, electric kettle, microwave, and a neat laser pointer/photodiode setup on his gas meter to measure consumption, he calculated exactly how much energy he was using to make a cup of tea.

The final numbers from [Tom]’s experiment revealed that a gas stove – using a pot with and without a lid on large and small burners – was about 20% efficient. A gas-powered hot water heater was much better at 55% efficiency, but the microwave and electric kettle had a miserable efficiencies of around 15 and 25%, respectively. There is a reason for the terrible inefficiency of using electricity to heat water; if only the power from the wall is considered, the electric kettle put 80% of energy consumed directly into the water. Because the electricity has to come from somewhere, usually a fossil-fueled power plant that operates at around 30% efficiency, the electric kettle method of turning dinosaurs into hot water is only about 25% efficient.

The take-home from this is there’s a lot of power being wasted every time you run a bath, make some coffee, or wash the dishes. We would all do better by decreasing how much energy we use, much like [Tom]’s efforts in using 5 times less power than his neighbor. Awesome job, [Tom].

A Wedding Cake Made Out Of LEDs

May 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[Andrew] wanted to do something special for his wedding. Since he and his fiance [Missy] decided on a cupcake wedding cake, [Andrew] decided to wow his guests with an RGB LED cupcake holder.

The tiers of [Andrew] and [Missy]’s cupcake holder are made of acrylic laser etched with a damask pattern. These tiers are supported by a cylinder embedded with RGB leds that provide edge lighting for the acrylic panels. The effect is a series of permutating lights that illuminate the cupcake holder with every imaginable color. On the top of the cupcake cake, there’s a great cake topper made of frosted and laser cut acrylic that has the same color fade effect as the cupcake holder.

On the electrical side of things, the cupcake holder has 44 LEDs on all it’s levels. FETs driven by a 40-pin PIC18F control all the LEDs and the whole piece is powered by a computer power supply.

It’s an awesome build, especially considering it was finished just days before the wedding. After the break, you can check out a few more videos showing off the beauty of [Andrew] and [Missy]’s wedding cake.

Continue reading “A Wedding Cake Made Out Of LEDs” →

Your Face In Chocolate

May 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

We think in might be absurdly vain, but wouldn’t it be fun to give everyone in your family a chocolate modeled after your mug this holiday season? [Eok.gnah] has already worked out a system to make this possible. It consists of three parts: scanning your head and building a 3D model from it, using that model to print a mold, and molding the chocolate itself.

He used 123D to scan his face. No mention of hardware but this face scanning rig would be perfect for it. He then cleaned up the input and used it to make a mold model by subtracting his face from a cube in OpenSCAD. That needs to be sliced into layers for the 3D printer, and he used the Slic3r program which has been gaining popularity. Finally the mold was printed and the face was cast with molten chocolate. We’d suggest using a random orbital sander (without sand paper) to vibrate the bottom of the mold. This would have helped to evacuate the bubble that messed up his nose.

You know, it doesn’t have to be your face. It could be another body part, even an internal one… like your brain!

A Simpler Sous-vide Hack

May 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Here are the contronl modules for a sous-vide project over at Nerdkits. [Humberto] and crew continue doing a great job of focusing a project on one goal, then explaining the steps needed to get there. In this case they wanted to build their own sous-vide appliance that was cheap, and didn’t really require the user to deal with mains voltage. We like it because most of the parts can be found at a hardware store and big box store.

He started with a slow cooker, which is pretty standard. Next he needed a way to switch power to the device. Instead of using a solid state relay, he went for a standard dimmer switch. It’s build into a double gang electrical box, and controls an outlet which is occupying the second position in that box. Now current to the slow cooker is limited by the position of the dimmer. The next task was to add a cardboard frame which marries a servo motor to the dimmer’s knob.

With the control scheme in place [Humberto] needed a feedback sensor. He built his own water proof temperature probe by covering an LM34 temperature sensor with shrink tube and sealing the ends. Just one probe in the cooking water isn’t very reliable so he added a second between the slow cooker’s base and ceramic vessel to improve the performace of the PID algorithm. He goes into detail about that in the video after the break.

Continue reading “A Simpler Sous-vide Hack” →

Custom Heaters For A DIY BBQ Smoker

April 4, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Spring is in the air, and with that comes savory meals cooked over the course of dozens of hours. While preparing for your yearly allotment of pork and beef, check out [Brett Beauregard]’s custom heater elements he built for a DIY wood smoker.

This build follows the very successful smoker [Brett] built last year. This year, he’s using the same toaster oven heating elements, only cut down to make the heater smaller and more efficient. Basically, [Brett] is making a small cartridge heater out of the equipment he already has.

After cutting the toaster oven heating elements to length, [Brett] reamed out the ends to expose the nichrome wire. A short hit with a TIG welder bonded the lead to the heating element. Insulated with furnace cement, [Brett] had a custom heater perfect for charring chunks of mesquite or hickory.

Meat smokers aren’t very complicated – they can be built with a flowerpot and a hotplate, and will still cook up a delicious dinner. We might have to borrow [Brett]’s technique when we build this year’s smoker.