showing the ramp and sprayer of the cider press

The Spiced (Cider) Must Flow

November 12, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 18 Comments

A fresh-squeezed glass of orange juice with breakfast seems like a trope that’s straight from a late 1980s sitcom. Making orange juice is easy; press until the liquid comes out. Apple juice (and, by extension, apple cider) is the same principle but requires much more force to squeeze out the juice. So what if you, like [Peter], have 900 lbs (408.2 kg for those metrically minded) of apples that you want to make cider out of? The obvious solution is to create a somewhat automated homemade cider press with lasers.

An earlier effort to make 25 gallons of cider took several full days of struggle for four people, so [Peter] knew he had to plan better next year. [Peter’s wife] milled and glued red oak into a large, sturdy frame that could press down with proper force and not break. [Peter] reached out to the local metal shop to fabricate a stainless steel tray with a custom drain. The cider basket itself and the pressboard were maple with waterproofing oil.

However, just because you can press apples, doesn’t mean you’re ready to make cider. They still need to be washed, cut, and ground into a pulp. A ramp was fashioned that it could be set in a truck bed with sprayers to wash the apples as they rolled by. A laser circuit with an LM393 opamp and a photoresistor allowed the sprayers to only activate when there was actually an apple to spray. Apple grinders are tricky as they need to survive the drop of several one-pound balls while staying at a reasonable speed. The grinder dispenses the pulp into a mesh nylon bag in a 5-gallon bucket, ready to be pressed. For the curious reader, 900lbs of apples yielded 60 gallons of delicious cider.

If you’re looking for a smaller scale press, here’s a cider press that’s a little simpler to make.

Furter Burner Cooks The Wieners Just So

October 6, 2021 by Lewin Day 31 Comments

Sometimes you’re hungry for two sausages, and not a sausage more. [Wesley] designed his Furter Burner to handle precisely these situations, and it looks to cook up a pair of wieners a treat. (Video, embedded below.)

The process starts with a couple of wooden stunt wieners, and some foam board, with which [Wesley] roughs out a design. From there, a CAD design is drawn up and parts routed out of compressed board to troubleshoot the assembly further. Later moving on to a plywood version, having a wooden prototype quickly reveals plenty of things to improve, from adding handles to the grill surface to air holes to allow combustion.

The design goes through a couple of further iterations in metal before completion. The final result is impressive—resulting in a twin-wiener cooker that burns coals, complete with skewers for easy sausage handling and bearing [Wesley’s] own logo.

The video shows off the benefits of the iterative design process. It also demonstrates why it often makes sense to rough out designs in cheaper materials before going to the heavy stuff, particularly in a case like [Wesley]’s where the metal parts can only be cut off-site. Refining the design in-house first saves a lot of mucking around.

We’ve seen [Wesley]’s work before, too – like this impressive workshop storage solution.

Continue reading “Furter Burner Cooks The Wieners Just So” →

Microwave Ovens: Need More Power? Use Lasers Instead!

September 28, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 15 Comments

You know how it is, you get in late from work, you’ve been stuck in traffic for what seems like an eternity, and you’re hungry. You reach for the microwave meal, and think, if only I didn’t have to wait that three-and-a-half minutes, 900 watts just isn’t enough power. What you need is a laser microwave, and as luck would have it, [Styropyro] has built one, so you don’t have to. No, really, don’t.

After he observed a microwave only operating on a half-wave basis, and delivering power 50% of the time, he attempted to convert it to full-wave by doubling up the high voltage transformer and rectification diodes. While this worked, the poor suffering magnetron didn’t go the full mile, and died somewhat prematurely.

Not to be disheartened, the obvious thing was to ditch the whole concept of cooking with boring old radio waves, and just use a pile of frickin’ lasers instead. Now we’re not sure how he manages to get hold of some of the parts he uses, and the laser array modules look sketchy to say the least, and to be frank, we don’t think they should be easy to get given the ridiculous beam power they can muster.

With the build completed to the usual [Styropryo] level of excellent build quality, he goes on to produce some mouthwatering delicacies such as laser-charred poptart, incinerated steak with not-really-caramelised onions and our favourite laser-popcorn. OK, he admits the beam has way too much power, really should be infrared, and way more diffuse to be even vaguely practical, but we don’t care about practicality round these parts. Who wouldn’t want the excitement of going instantly blind by merely walking into the kitchen at the wrong time?

We’ve covered a fair few microwave oven related hacks before, including a neat microwave kiln, and hacks using microwave parts, such as a janky Jacob’s ladder, but this is probably the first laser microwave we’ve come across. Hopefully the last :)

And remember kids, as [Styropyro] says in pretty much every video on his channel:

All the crazy stuff I’m about to do was done for educational purposes, in fact if you were to try any of this stuff at home, you’d probably die…

Continue reading “Microwave Ovens: Need More Power? Use Lasers Instead!” →

AI Powered Coffee Maker Knows A Bit Too Much About You

September 9, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 20 Comments

People keep warning that Skynet and the great robot uprising is not that far away, what with all this recent AI and machine-learning malarky getting all the attention lately. But we think going straight for a terminator robot army is not a very smart approach, not least due to a lack of subtlety. We think that it’s a much better bet to take over the world one home appliance at a time, and this AI Powered coffee maker might just well be part of that master plan.

Raspberry Pi Zero sitting atop the custom nixie tube driver PCB — PCB stackup with Pi Zero sat atop the driver / PSU PCBs

[Mark Smith] has taken a standard semi-auto espresso maker and jazzed it up a bit, with a sweet bar graph nixie tube the only obvious addition, at least from the front of the unit. Inside, a Raspberry Pi Zero sits atop his own nixie tube hat and associated power supply. The whole assembly is dropped into a 3D printed case and lives snuggled up to the water pump.

The Pi is running a web application written with the excellent Flask framework, and also an additional control application written in python. This allows the user to connect to the machine via Ethernet and see its status. The smarts are in the form of a simple self-grading machine learning algorithm, that takes a time series as an input (in this case when you take your shots of espresso) and after a few weeks of data, is able to make a reasonable prediction as to when you might want it in the future. It then automatically heats up in time for you to use the machine, when you usually do, then cools back down to save energy. No more pointless wandering around to see if the machine is hot enough yet – as you can just check the web page and see from the comfort of your desk.

But that’s not all [Mark] has done. He also improved the temperature control of the water boiler, and added an interlock that prevents the machine from producing a shot until the water temperature is just so. Water level is indicated by the glorious bar graph nixie tube, which also serves a few other user indication duties when appropriate. All in all a pretty sweet build, but we do add a word of caution: If your toaster starts making an unreasonable number of offers of toasted teacakes, give it a wide berth.

E-Ink Equipped Sourdough Starter Jar

July 3, 2021 by Danie Conradie 2 Comments

One of the unexpected side effects of our this pandemic is a sudden growth in the global population of captive colonies of Lactobacillus bacteria and yeast. Also known as sourdough starters, they are usually found in jars with curious names written on top, living off a mixture of flour and water. They require close monitoring to keep them healthy and to determine when they are ready for baking. [Noah Feehan] has been working to instrument and automate the process for the past two years, and has created a high-tech jar to keep an eye on his sourdough starter.

For a sourdough starter to stay active, it must be kept within a certain temperature range, and performance is measured by how much the level inside the jar rises. Existing open source and commercial projects monitor these two parameters and transmit data out, but [Noah] wanted to include a few more features. The height of a sourdough starter rises due to the production of CO2, so he added an SCD-30 sensor module, which includes a temperature and humidity sensor. For level monitoring, an VL6180 time-of-flight sensor is mounted over a hole on top of the jar. [Noah] wanted to be able to see recent CO2 production and height stats right on the jar, a ESP32 module with onboard E-ink display was used. To draw air over the CO2 sensor at a constant rate, a small extraction fan was also added. Power is provided by a small LiPo battery. For long term logging, the data is sent over MQTT to a server running Mycodo environmental regulation software.

There are still several software improvements [Noah] would like to make, including battery life, user interface and alerts, but everything is open-source and available on GitHub, so feel free to jump in and build your own.

Flat-Pack Pasta: Like Ikea Furniture Without The Weird Wrench

May 26, 2021 by Kristina Panos 46 Comments

When it comes to food packaging, there’s no bigger scam than potato chip bags, right? People complain about the air (nitrogen, actually) inside, but it’s there for a reason — nitrogen pushes out oxygen, so the chips live in a state of factory-fresh dormancy until you rip open the bag and release the gas. If you want flat-pack chips, there’s always those uniformly-shaped potato slurry wafers that come in a can. But even those usually manage to have a few broken ones.

On the other hand, no one complains about the extra space in their box of fusilli — that would be silly. But seriously, successfully shipping fragile foods requires either flat packing or a lot of extra space, especially if that food comes in a myriad of fun 3D shapes like pasta does. Everybody knows that 3D pasta is superior to flat pasta because it holds sauces so much better. The pasta must be kept intact!

The great thing about pasta as a food is that it’s simple to make, and it’s more nutritious than potato chips. Because of these factors, pasta is often served in extreme situations to large groups of people, like soldiers and the involuntarily displaced. But storing large quantities of shapely pasta takes up quite a bit of space. And because of all that necessary air, much of the packaging goes to waste.

So what if you could keep your plethora of pasta in, say, a filing cabinet? A research team led by the Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to make flat-pack pasta that springs to life after a few minutes in boiling water.

Continue reading “Flat-Pack Pasta: Like Ikea Furniture Without The Weird Wrench” →

Iridescent Rainbow Chocolate, Just Add Diffraction Grating!

May 23, 2021 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

Chocolate plus diffraction grating equals rainbow chocolate

Here’s a great picture from [Jelly & Marshmallows] that shows off the wild effects of melted chocolate poured onto a diffraction grating. A diffraction grating is a kind of optical component whose micro-features act to disperse and scatter light. Diffraction gratings are available as thin plastic film with one side that is chock full of microscopic ridges, and the way light interacts with these ridges results in an iridescent, rainbow effect not unlike that seen on a CD or laserdisc.

It turns out that these micro-ridges can act as a mold, and pouring chocolate over a diffraction grating yields holo-chocolate. These photos from [Jelly & Marshmallows] show this effect off very nicely, but as cool as it is, we do notice that some of the letters seem a wee bit hit-or-miss in how well they picked up the diffraction grating pattern.

Fortunately, we know just what to suggest to take things to the next level. If you want to know more about how exactly this effect can be reliably accomplished, you’ll want to check out our earlier coverage of such delicious optics, which goes into all the nitty-gritty detail one could ever want about getting the best results with either melted sugar, or dark chocolate.