Chemistry

DIY Conductive Glass You Could Actually Make

March 20, 2017 by 54 Comments

Transparent, conductive glass is cool stuff and enables LCD panels and more. But the commercial method involves sputtering indium-tin oxide, which means a high vacuum and some high voltages, which is doable, but not exactly hacker-friendly. [Simplifier] has documented an alternative procedure that uses nothing more than a camp-stove hotplate and an airbrush. And some chemistry.

Make no mistake, this is definitely do-it-outside chemistry. The mixture that [Simplifier] has settled on includes stannous (tin) chloride and ammonium bifluoride in solution. This is sprayed uniformly onto the heated glass (350-400° C), and after it’s evaporated there is a thin, strong, and transparent layer of fluorine-doped tin oxide. [Simplifier] reports resistances down in the single-digit Ohms per square, which is pretty awesome. [Simplifier] didn’t get the mix down perfectly on the first pass, of course, so it’s also interesting to read up on the intermediate steps.

Our thoughts immediately spring to masking sections of glass off and building DIY transparent circuits and panels, but we suspect that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Still, this is an incredible early result, and we hope that it opens up the way to crazy transparent-conductive applications. What would you do if you could make glass circuits? Well, now you can, and it doesn’t look too hard.

Continue reading “DIY Conductive Glass You Could Actually Make” →

Morbid Battery Uses Blood Electrolyte

March 19, 2017 by 22 Comments

Building a battery out of common household products is actually pretty simple. All that is required is two dissimilar metals and some sort of electrolyte to facility the transfer of charge. A popular grade school science experiment demonstrates this fairly well by using copper and zinc plates set inside a potato or a lemon. Almost anything can be used as the charge transfer medium, as [dmitry] demonstrates by creating a rather macabre battery using his own blood.

The battery was part of an art and science exhibition but it probably wouldn’t be sustainable on a large scale, as it took [dmitry] around 18 months to bank enough blood to make a useful battery. Blood contains a lot of electrolytes that make it perfect for this application though, and with the addition of the copper anode and aluminum cathode [dmitry] can power a small speaker which plays a sound-generating algorithm that frankly adds a very surreal element to the art installation.

While we can’t recommend that you try to build one of these batteries on your own without proper medical supervision, the video of the art piece is worth checking out. We’ve seen a few other hacks that involve blood, but usually they are attempting to use it for its intended purpose rather than as an alternative energy source.

Growing Plants on Mars… on Earth

February 25, 2017 by 57 Comments

One of the biggest challenges of traveling to Mars is that it’s far away. That might seem obvious, but that comes with its own set of problems when compared to traveling to something relatively close like the Moon. The core issue is weight, and this becomes a big deal when you have to feed several astronauts for months or years. If food could be grown on Mars, however, this would make the trip easier to make. This is exactly the problem that [Clinton] is working on with his Martian terrarium, or “marsarium”.

The first task was to obtain some soil that would be a good analog of Martian soil. Obtaining the real thing was out of the question, as was getting similar dirt from Hawaii. [Clinton] decided to make his own by mixing various compounds from the hardware store in the appropriate amounts. From there he turned to creating the enclosure and filling it with the appropriate atmosphere. Various gas canisters controlled by gas solenoid valves mixed up the analog to Martian atmosphere: 96% dioxide, 2% argon, and 2% nitrogen. The entire experiment was controlled by an Intel Edison with custom circuits for all of the sensors and regulating equipment. Check out the appropriately dramatic video of the process after the break.

While the fern that [Clinton] planted did survive the 30-day experiment in the marsarium, it wasn’t doing too well. There’s an apparent lack of nitrogen in Martian soil which is crucial for plants to survive. Normally this is accomplished when another life form “fixes” nitrogen to the soil, but Mars probably doesn’t have any of that. Future experiments would need something that could do this for the other plants, but [Clinton] notes that he’ll need a larger marsarium for that. And, if you’re not interested in plants or Mars, there are some other interesting ramifications of nitrogen-fixing as well.

Continue reading “Growing Plants on Mars… on Earth” →

Open Microfluidics Instrumentation Playset

November 17, 2016 by 17 Comments

Micro-what? Microfluidics! It’s the field of dealing with tiny, tiny bits of fluids, and there are some very interesting applications in engineering, biology, and chemistry. [Martin Fischlechner], [Jonathan West], and [Klaus-Peter Zauner] are academic scientists who were working on microfluidics and made their own apparatus, initially because money was tight. Now they’ve stuck to the DIY approach because they can get custom machinery that simply doesn’t exist.

In addition to their collaboration, and to spread the ideas to other labs, they formed DropletKitchen to help advance the state of the art. And you, budding DIY biohacker, can reap the rewards.

In particular, the group is focused on droplet microfluidics. Keeping a biological or chemical reaction confined to its own tiny droplet is like running it inside its own test-tube, but because of the high rate at which the droplets can be pumped out, literally millions of these test-tubes are available. Want to grow hundreds of thousands of single cells, each in their own environment? Done.

The DropletKitchen kit includes an accurate pump system, along with high-speed camera and flash setups to verify that everything’s working as it should. Everything is open-source, and a lot of it is 3D-printable and written in OpenSCAD so that it’s even easy to modify to fit your exact needs. You just need to bring the science.

This is a professional-grade open source project, and we’re excited to see it when academics take a turn toward the open. Bringing cutting edge processing technologies within reach of the biohacker community is a huge multiplier. We can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

Retrotechtacular: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

November 11, 2016 by 33 Comments

Back in “the old days” (that is, when I was a kid), kids led lives of danger and excitement. We rode bikes with no protective gear. We stayed out roaming the streets after dark without adult supervision. We had toy guns that looked like real ones. Dentists gave us mercury to play with. We also blew things up and did other dangerous science experiments.

If you want a taste of what that was like, you might enjoy The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. The book, first published in 1960, offers to show you how to set up a home laboratory and provides 200 experiments. The colorfully illustrated book shows you how to do some basic lab work as well as offering some science history and terminology.

Want to make oxygen? There’s several methods on page 27. Page 28 covers making hydrogen. To test the hydrogen for purity, the suggest you collect a test tube full, invert it, and stick a match up to the tube. If the hydrogen is pure it will burn with a pop noise. If air is mixed it, it will explode. Yeah, that sound safe to us.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments” →

Chemical Hacking at a Store Near You

November 11, 2016 by 55 Comments

Imagine for a minute that you aren’t an electronic-savvy Hackaday reader. But you find an old chemistry book at a garage sale and start reading it. It has lots of interesting looking experiments, but they all require chemicals with strange exotic names. One of them is ferric chloride. You could go find a scientific supply company, but that’s expensive and often difficult to deal with as an individual (for example, 2.5 liters of nitric acid costs over $300 for a case of six at a common lab supply company). Where would you go?

As an astute electronics guy (or gal) you probably know that ferric chloride is common for PCB etching, so you would check the electronic store down the street or maybe Radio Shack if you are lucky enough to find one that still stocks it.

So sometimes knowing where to look for a chemical is a key part of acquiring it, especially when the names are not the same. For example, do you have any amylose? No? That’s corn starch. Want to try making your own cadmium sulfide light sensor? Go to the art supply store and ask for cadmium yellow pigment. Need magnesium carbonate? Stop by a sporting goods store and ask for athlete’s chalk.

Continue reading “Chemical Hacking at a Store Near You” →

See if You Can Reverse Engineer This Scrap Metal Battery

November 5, 2016 by 40 Comments

We got quite a few tips in about a paper from Vanderbilt about a cool scrap metal battery they’ve been playing with. They made some pretty bold claims and when we fed the numbers in they pretty much say they’ve got a battery you can make at home, that can hold half as much as a lead acid, can be made out of scraps in a cave (even if you’re not Tony Stark), charge super fast,and can cycle 5,000 times without appreciable capacity loss.  Needless to say that’s super cool.

Of course, science research is as broken as ever and the paper was hidden behind a paywall. Through mysterious powers such as the library and bothering people we were able to get past this cunning defense and read the paper. Unfortunately the paper reads more like a brag track than a useful experimental guide on how to build the dang battery. It’s also possible that our copy was missing some pages. Anyway, we want to do science!

Anyway, here’s what we know. The battery is based on an ancient battery called the Baghdad Battery. The ancient battery supposedly used iron and copper with a mystery electrolyte. The scrap battery, however, is made from scrap iron and scrap brass. The iron makes sense, but why brass? Well, brass has copper in it, and you can still get at it chemically even if it’s alloyed.

To that end, the next step was to throw some oxygen atoms in with those pesky Fe and Cu ones. The goal is to get a redox reaction going. If you do it right you can achieve pseudocapacitance. To to this the researchers used “common household chemicals and voltages” to anodize the iron and copper inside the brass. The press photo have them holding a gallon of muratic acid, if that helps. We don’t know, but if they can jam a few oxygen atoms in there then so can we!

After that it’s all about sitting the electrodes in a bath of potassium hydroxide. We guess you can scrape the inside of an AA for that. Anyway, the paper’s light on process but the battery seems really cool. They’re not pursuing this research for commercialization, instead going the OSHW route. They hope to get to the point where anyone can just grind up a bunch of scrap steel and brass, maybe throw it in a birdcage, anodize it, and get a super long life battery for grid use for less than a lead acid. If any of you manage to build one of these drop us a tip!