Butta Melta Stops Rock-solid Butter From Tearing Your Toast

August 25, 2025 by Donald Papp 52 Comments

Ever ruin a perfectly serviceable piece of toast by trying (and failing) to spread a little pat of rock-solid butter? [John Dingley] doesn’t! Not since he created the Butta Melta to cozily snug a single butter serving right up against a warm beverage, softening it just enough to get nice and spreadable. Just insert one of those foil-wrapped pats of butter into the Melta, hang its chin on the edge of your mug, and you’ll have evenly softened butter in no time.

The Butta Melta is intentionally designed with a bit of personality, but also has features we think are worth highlighting. One is the way it’s clearly designed with 3D printing in mind, making it an easy print on just about any machine in no time at all. The second is the presence of the hinge point which really helps the Butta Melta conform to a variety of cup designs, holding the payload as close as possible to the heat regardless of cup shape. A couple of minutes next to a hot beverage is all it takes for the butter to soften enough to become easily spreadable.

You may remember [John] (aka [XenonJohn]) from his experimental self-balancing scooters, or from a documentary he made about domestic ventilator development during COVID. He taught himself video editing and production to make that, and couldn’t resist using those skills to turn a video demo of the Butta Melta into a mock home shopping style advertisement. Watch it below, embedded just under the page break, then print one and save yourself from the tyranny of torn toast.

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Food Irradiation Is Not As Bad As It Sounds

August 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 50 Comments

Radiation is a bad thing that we don’t want to be exposed to, or so the conventional wisdom goes. We’re most familiar with it in the context of industrial risks and the stories of nuclear disasters that threaten entire cities and contaminate local food chains. It’s certainly not something you’d want anywhere near your dinner, right?

You might then be surprised to find that a great deal of research has been conducted into the process of food irradiation. It’s actually intended to ensure food is safer for human consumption, and has become widely used around the world.

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A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain

July 17, 2025 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where to look. From the substations, transmission lines, and local distribution systems that make up the electrical grid to cell towers and even weigh stations, most of what we’ve covered so far are mega-scale engineering projects that are critical to modern life, each of which you can get a good look at while you’re tooling down the road in a car.

This time around, though, we’re going to switch things up a bit and discuss a less-obvious but vitally important infrastructure system: the cold chain. While you might never have heard the term, you’ve certainly seen most of the major components at one time or another, and if you’ve ever enjoyed fresh fruit in the dead of winter or microwaved a frozen burrito for dinner, you’ve taken advantage of a globe-spanning system that makes sure environmentally sensitive products can be safely stored and transported.

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High Frequency Food: Better Cutting With Ultrasonics

March 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 37 Comments

You’re cutting yourself a single slice of cake. You grab a butter knife out of the drawer, hack off a moist wedge, and munch away to your mouth’s delight. The next day, you’re cutting forty slices of cake for the whole office. You grab a large chef’s knife, warm it with hot water, and cube out the sheet cake without causing too much trauma to the icing. Next week, you’re starting at your cousin’s bakery. You’re supposed to cut a few thousand slices of cake, week in, week out. You suspect your haggardly knifework won’t do.

In the home kitchen, any old knife will do the job when it comes to slicing cakes, pies, and pastries. When it comes to commercial kitchens, though, presentation is everything and perfection is the bare minimum. Thankfully, there’s a better grade of cutting tool out there—and it’s more high tech than you might think.

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Pizza Elevator Is The Most Vital Pandemic Technology Of All

July 28, 2023 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Remember the darkest days of lockdown and the pandemic? We were trying to distance ourselves from strangers wherever possible. [scealux]’s pizza elevator was spawned at this time to make apartment pizza deliveries as contactless as possible, and it’s charmingly branded to boot.

The build was intended to loft a pizza from street level to a third-floor balcony (by the American convention, ground floor is numbered one). Built with CNC-cut wooden parts, the elevator frame snap-fits on to the balcony railing. From there, a single spool runs out wire to four corners of the elevator platform.

As the crank is turned, the platform lowers under its own weight. The pizza can then be placed on the platform, and dinner can be lifted back up to the apartment. It’s a simple design, and one that manages to lift the pizza in a stable and flat fashion. With that said, we’d still like to see some anti-tip railings on a potential revision two.

Mock the branding all you will, it’s actually a smart design choice. The recognizable logo made the device’s purpose super obvious to the pizza delivery person, easing the introduction of the technology to a new user base.

If you want to make your own pizza instead of ordering out, you can automate that too.

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A series of food items along the bottom of the frame including an unidentified grey block, an almond, a food supplement capsule, a square of seaweed, a square of beeswax, and a crumpled up piece of gold foil. At the top of the image is a fully assembled battery with electrodes sticking out the ends of a block of beeswax and a half finished battery with the nori separator visible.

A Delicious Advancement In Battery Tech

April 22, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 2 Comments

Electronics have been sent to some pretty extreme environments, but inside a living host is a particularly tricky set of conditions, especially if you don’t want to damage the organism ingesting the equipment. One step in that direction could be an edible battery cell. (via Electrek)

Developed by scientists at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, this new cell is made from food additives and ingredients to skirt any nasty side effects one might experience from ingesting a less palatable battery chemistry like NiCd. A riboflavin anode is coupled with a quercetin cathode, both with activated carbon to increase conductivity. Encapsulated in beeswax and with a separator made of nori algae, the battery is completely non-toxic.

The cell generates a modest 0.65V with a max sustained current of 48 µA for 12 min, but it shows promise as a power source for ingestible medical sensors, even if it won’t be powering your next mobile Raspberry Pi project. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen edible electronics; check out this screaming chocolate rabbit or robots made of candy.

a microwave-oven with animated wave diagram

Dive Into The Microwaves, The Water’s Dipolar

March 27, 2023 by Michael Shaub 22 Comments

When the microwave oven started to gain popularity in the 60s and 70s, supporters and critics alike predicted that it would usher in the end of cooking as we knew it. Obviously that never quite happened, but not because the technology didn’t work as intended. Even today, this versatile kitchen appliance seems to employ some magic to caffeinate or feed a growing hacker in no time flat. So, how exactly does this modern marvel work?

That’s exactly what [Electronoob] set out to explain in his latest video. After previously taking apart a microwave and showing off the magnetron within he’s back with a clear explanation of how these devices work.

Maybe you have no idea, or have heard something vague about the water in the food wiggling in response to the microwaves. Do you know why microwaves and not some other part of the electromagnetic spectrum? Why the food spins on a platter? How the size of the oven relative to the wavelength affects the efficiency of its cooking? We didn’t, and think the video is a great primer on all of this and more.

Here at Hackaday, we sure love using and abusing microwave ovens. From upgrading them with voice control back in 2013, to turning them into UV curing chambers and mini foundries, to the limitless possibilities for the transformers and magnetrons that await us inside, we just can’t get enough. (this is our 82nd article tagged with microwave!)

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